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Gothic novel

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• Woodbury University - Elements of the Gothic Novel
• The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - Gothic novel
• Gothic fiction - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Gothic novel , European Romantic pseudomedieval fiction having a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror. Its heyday was the 1790s, but it underwent frequent revivals in subsequent centuries.

Called Gothic because its imaginative impulse was drawn from medieval buildings and ruins, such novels commonly used such settings as castles or monasteries equipped with subterranean passages, dark battlements, hidden panels, and trapdoors. The vogue was initiated in England by Horace Walpole ’s immensely successful The Castle of Otranto (1765). His most respectable follower was Ann Radcliffe , whose The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) are among the best examples of the genre .

A more sensational type of Gothic romance exploiting horror and violence flourished in Germany and was introduced to England by Matthew Gregory Lewis with The Monk (1796). Other landmarks of Gothic fiction are William Beckford ’s Oriental romance Vathek (1786) and Charles Robert Maturin ’s story of an Irish Faust , Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).

The classic horror stories Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley , and Dracula (1897), by Bram Stoker , are in the Gothic tradition but introduce the existential nature of humankind as its definitive mystery and terror.

Easy targets for satire , the early Gothic romances died of their own extravagances of plot , but Gothic atmospheric machinery continued to haunt the fiction of such major writers as Charlotte , Anne , and Emily Brontë , Edgar Allan Poe , Nathaniel Hawthorne , and even Charles Dickens in Bleak House and Great Expectations . In the second half of the 20th century, the term was applied to paperback romances having the same kind of themes and trappings similar to the originals.

Gothic Literature — Definition, Elements, and Examples

What is gothic literature.

Gothic literature focuses on the darker aspects of humanity paired with intense contrasting emotions such as pleasure and pain or love and death. A classic example of a Gothic novel is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Gothic literature is often set around dilapidated castles, secluded estates, and unfamiliar environments.

Gothic works often includes characteristics like omens, the supernatural, and romance.

Gothic literature tends to incorporate revenge, family secrets, prophecies, psychological struggles, and "damsels in distress."

Gothic literature emerged in Europe during the 18th century and was inspired by Gothic architecture from the Middle Ages.

Like Romanticism, the Gothic style arose as a response to the Enlightenment. Gothic writers rebelled against the Enlightenment notion of understanding the world purely through logic. Romantics believed in individualism, idealism, and emotional passion, which they felt were positive ways to live.

Gothics agreed with the same ideas, yet they suggested the outcomes of following those ideas could have darker implications. As such, Gothic literature is often also identified as Dark Romanticism.

Gothic elements

Gothic literature in English typically contains characteristics like omens, the supernatural, romance, and anti-heroes.

The physical location of the setting within Gothic literature mimics or influences characters’ emotions. Since most Gothic stories are set in gloomy and foreboding places (old castles, cemeteries, dark forests, etc.) with ominous weather conditions (foggy, thunderstorms, etc.), the characters’ surroundings negatively impact them.

Writers often used omens to foreshadow future events that would disrupt the characters’ lives. These predictions came in the form of curses, nightmares, and/or visions and mostly forecast tragedy.

Plots often include supernatural elements like resurrection, spirits/ghosts, vampires, werewolves, etc. Some authors attempted to explain the existence of the supernatural, while others classified it as entirely paranormal. Regardless, the supernatural entities/events provide commentary on some aspect of the human condition.

Many Gothic novels incorporate a romantic relationship between the protagonist and another character. However, these relationships are often destined for doom and tragedy, highlighting the negative implications of lost love.

Villains often take the form of male characters in some position of power. Authors may present these characters as sympathetic to hide their deceptive nature.

Through exaggerated and hyperbolic emotional expressions , authors present their characters in a state of intense fear, anxiety, stress, etc. The characters often experience great emotional distress, madness, or psychosis.

The protagonist is often developed as an anti-hero . These characters drive the plot, but they often lack conventional heroic qualities. These characters were often seen as much more realistic than the typical hero/heroine.

The anti-villain is the reverse of the anti-hero. While these characters are considered villains, they often blur the line between good and evil.

Gothic authors often use a hero-villain as the antagonist. These characters are so complex that it becomes difficult to determine whether they are good or bad.

Distressed female characters tend to be characterized as the victims; their suffering from being alone or abandoned often becomes the central focus of the plot. As such, female characters become controlled by male characters who have power due to their authority or social position.

Characters experience psychological struggles that can lead to hallucinations, anxiety, and/or psychosis.

Gothic literature examples

Some of the most notable writers who incorporated Gothic elements in their works include Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker:

A Brief Introduction to Gothic Literature

Elements, Themes, and Examples from the Gothic Style

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The term Gothic originates with the architecture created by the Germanic Goth tribes that was later expanded to include most medieval architecture. Ornate, intricate, and heavy-handed, this style of architecture proved to be the ideal backdrop for both the physical and the psychological settings in a new literary genre, one that concerned itself with elaborate tales of mystery, suspense, and superstition. While there are several notable precursors, the height of the Gothic period, which was closely aligned with Romanticism , is usually considered to have been the years 1764 to about 1840, however, its influence extends to 20th-century authors such as V.C. Andrews, Iain Banks, and Anne Rice.

Plot and Examples

Gothic plotlines typically involve an unsuspecting person (or persons)—usually an innocent, naive, somewhat helpless heroine—who becomes embroiled in complex and oftentimes evil paranormal scheme. An example of this trope is young Emily St. Aubert in Anne Radcliffe’s classic Gothic 1794 novel, "The Mysteries of Udolpho," which would later inspire a parody in form of Jane Austen ’s 1817 "Northanger Abbey."

The benchmark for pure Gothic fiction is perhaps the first example of the genre, Horace Walpole’s "The Castle of Otranto" (1764). Although not a long tale in the telling, the dark, its oppressive setting combined with elements of terror and medievalism set the bar for an entirely new, thrilling form of literature.

Key Elements

Most Gothic literature contains certain key elements that include:

• Atmosphere : The atmosphere in a Gothic novel is one characterized by mystery, suspense, and fear, which is usually heightened by elements of the unknown or unexplained.
• Setting : The setting of a Gothic novel can often rightly be considered a character in its own right. As Gothic architecture plays an important role, many of the stories are set in a castle or large manor, which is typically abandoned or at least run-down, and far removed from civilization (so no one can hear you should you call for help). Other settings may include caves or wilderness locales, such as a moor or heath.
• Clergy: Often, as in "The Monk" and "The Castle of Otranto," the clergy play important secondary roles in Gothic fare. These (mostly) men of the cloth are often portrayed as being weak and sometimes outrageously evil.
• The paranormal : Gothic fiction almost always contains elements of the supernatural or paranormal, such as ghosts or vampires. In some works, these supernatural features are later explained in perfectly reasonable terms, however, in other instances, they remain completely beyond the realm of rational explanation.
• Melodrama : Also called “high emotion,” melodrama is created through highly sentimental language and instances of overwrought emotion. The panic, terror, and other feelings characters experience is often expressed in a way that's overblown and exaggerated in order to make them seem out of control and at the mercy of the increasingly malevolent influences that surround them.
• Omens : Typical of the genre, omens—or portents and visions—often foreshadow events to come. They can take many forms, such as dreams, spiritual visitations, or tarot card readings.
• Virgin in distress : With the exception of a few novels, such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s "Carmilla" (1872), most Gothic villains are powerful males who prey on young, virginal women (think Dracula). This dynamic creates tension and appeals deeply to the reader's sense of pathos, particularly as these heroines typically tend to be orphaned, abandoned, or somehow severed from the world, without guardianship.

Modern Critiques

Modern readers and critics have begun to think of Gothic literature as referring to any story that uses an elaborate setting, combined with supernatural or super-evil forces against an innocent protagonist. The contemporary understanding is similar but has widened to include a variety of genres, such as paranormal and horror. 

Selected Bibliography

In addition to "The Mysteries of Udolpho" and "The Castle of Otranto," there are a number of classic novels that those interested in Gothic literature will want to pick up. Here's a list of 10 titles that are not to be missed:

• "The History of the Caliph Vathek" (1786) by William Thomas Beckford
• "The Monk" (1796) by Mathew Lewis
• "Frankenstein" (1818) by Mary Shelley
• "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820) by Charles Maturin
• "Salathiel the Immortal" (1828) by George Croly
• " The Hunchback of Notre-Dame " (1831) by Victor Hugo
• "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe
• "Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood" (1847) by James Malcolm Rymer
• "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
• " Dracula " (1897) by Bram Stoker
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Gothic Roots and Conventions

In the opening pages of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Manfred, whom readers will come to recognize as a definitive Gothic villain, sends a servant to fetch his son, Prince Conrad, who is to marry the Lady Isabella; however, the servant discovers Conrad crushed to death beneath an impossibly large, black-plumed helmet. Manfred, having only this one heir and a wife incapable of bearing additional children, immediately sets upon Isabella with the aim of taking her as his own wife. In the words of Robert Spector, the ensuing events, “provided all the machinery of the [Gothic] genre; its setting, theme, and subversive subject matter remained the stock material of the Gothic whatever changes it underwent” (9). Within the first chapter, readers encounter a prophecy, the supernatural, a beautiful virgin, a dutiful, abandoned wife, a persecuted maiden, ridiculous servants, a young, handsome peasant, and a ghost, all set within the labyrinthine corridors of the eponymous castle. Carol Margaret Davison builds on Spector’s theory, pointing out how “as the vast majority of Gothic works illustrate, the component parts of this untidy and undying monster have been variously, regularly and successfully reconfigured to promote vastly different political and aesthetic ends and to speak to a broad cross-section of audiences and eras” (57). For the next several decades, authors as varied as Ann Radcliffe, Sir Walter Scott, and Jane Austen would utilize various aspects of the genre to different ends, each manipulating Gothic’s stock elements to fit his or her unique aim.

Gothic literature arose at the end of the eighteenth century during a time of social, political, and economic unrest. Thus, it was and continues to be described as a reactionary genre devoted to returning repressed societal fears to our attention so we might expel them. The period typically associated with European Gothic fiction begins with Horace Walpole’s T he Castle of Otranto published in 1764 and ends with Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer published in 1820. Though this time span is still used to describe the rise and “fall” of Gothic literature, the genre experienced in the 1790s a period of such vogue that it is now referred to as “the effulgence of Gothic” after Robert Miles’ study of the same name. It was during this period that the most well-known Gothic authors, including Ann Radcliffe (discussed in “Female Gothic”) and Matthew Gregory Lewis, published most of their fiction and inspired a deluge of imitations, including William Beckford’s Vathek, which became known to Gothic scholars as “The Radcliffe School” of terror or the “Lewisite” horror story.

Though Gothic fiction is most easily recognized via the formulaic plot devices and stock characters briefly mentioned above, one of its most important and often overlooked characteristics is its reliance on anachronisms to highlight the clash between “modernity” and “antiquity.” Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall explain that the purpose of anachronism in Gothic fiction is to allow the “birth of modernity” through the anachronism’s defeat and removal (278). The earliest Gothic narratives established a formula that remained largely unchanged both in England and America throughout what American Gothic scholar Donald A. Ringe refers to as the genre’s “major phase,” which roughly coincided with Miles’ “effulgence” of Gothic in England (176). Indeed, the formula became so pervasive that Eve Sedgwick produced a book-length study dedicated to examining The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. In this cornerstone critical text, Sedgwick identifies many of Gothic literature’s important features:

“An oppressive ruin, a wild landscape, a Catholic or feudal society. You know about the trembling sensibility of the heroine and the impetuosity of her lover. You know about the tyrannical older man with the piercing glance who is going to imprison and try to rape or murder them” (9).

Having established our knowledge of these key points, Sedgwick identifies what Gothic scholars would eventually refer to as the “laundry list” of stock elements, at least a handful of which readers are likely to encounter in any Gothic tale:

These include the priesthood and monastic institutions; sleeplike and deathlike states; subterranean spaces and live burial; doubles; the discovery of obscured family ties; affinities between narrative and pictorial art; possibilities of incest; unnatural echoes or silences, unintelligible writings, and the unspeakable; garrulous retainers; the poisonous effects of guilt and shame; nocturnal landscapes and dreams; apparitions from the past; Faust- and Wandering Jew-like figures; civil insurrections and fires; the charnel house and the madhouse. (9-10)

Several of the items in Sedgwick’s list have already been identified just in the first chapter of Walpole’s Otranto , and many appear in Lewis’ and Beckford’s most well-known works excerpted in this textbook.

These stock elements of the Gothic combine to create a specific effect on readers. The ruined abbeys and mountainous landscapes of Ann Radcliffe’s novels, for example, exist specifically, according to S.L. Varnado, to create moments when the reader “becomes aware of an objective spiritual presence,” through “feelings of awe, mystery, and fascination” (15). This feeling, which Varnado, using Kant’s terms, calls “the numinous,” can oscillate between positive and negative aspects: awe and fear, fascination and repulsion, terror and horror. Jerrold Hogle describes the oscillation in Gothic fiction between terror and horror, stating that “the first of these holds characters and readers mostly in anxious suspense . . . while the latter confronts the principal characters with the gross violence of physical or psychological dissolution” (3). Edmund Burke’s theories of sublimity and beauty supply basic categories that critics have employed to analyze Gothic writers’ moral effects. These categories appear in discussions about the ability of terror or horror to educate readers morally in terms of much-contested claims about the moral effects of pleasurable and painful experience. Burke defines beauty as “that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it,” associating it with that which inspires love (83 and 103). He defines sublimity, on the other hand, as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger,” and claims that “it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” (36 and 103). Through sensations of pain and pleasure associated with experiencing the beautiful and the sublime in art and life, individuals exercise and develop their mental and spiritual capacities. Beauty, then, is associated with the pleasurable, the social, domestic, and feminine, while the sublime, with power, masculinity, danger, fear, and even delight if the danger does not threaten destruction. Thus, Burke’s ideas regarding masculine sublimity and feminine beauty underlie in part the “gendering” of the Gothic canon that occurred in twentieth-century literary criticism discussed in more depth in the next section.

Because of its presentation of “deteriorating castles, abbeys, and manor houses in foreign, usually Roman Catholic, countries” as sublime and beautiful, conservative elements of Protestant England saw Gothic fiction not only as too spectacular in its portrayal of disorder and decadence, but also too similar to Catholicism in its portrayal of superstitious and supernatural elements (Davison 93). On one hand, conservative elements denounced its involvement in a “promiscuous spread of knowledge” that would undermine social and individual safety and security by destabilizing authority and received traditions (Miles 16). The emotional content and effects of Gothic fiction and the sensational nature of its themes caused many, especially those in power, to deem the Gothic, and the arts in general, to be detrimental to society’s moral growth (Kilgour 33). On the other hand, progressive elements recognized its capacity for mounting political and cultural critiques precisely by representing the Catholic Church and divine-rights monarchy as source and symbol of all that was bad in English history.

Political and Religious Contexts

In Georgian England, the period that gave birth to Gothic literature was also the era that witnessed some of the most horrific atrocities and fantastic accomplishments in the country’s history. These events resulted in large part from the agitations arising from demands for increased individual liberty and autonomy. The American Revolution from 1765-83, the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, the Regency Crisis of 1788, the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the French Revolution from 1789-99, and the Reign of Terror from 1793-94, and a rapidly advancing industrial and capitalist economy supplied crises with which the people of England dealt daily along with cultural upheavals that resulted in the categorical instability that Michael McKeon and, more recently, Ian Haywood, describe as characteristic of the preoccupations that informed eighteenth-century fiction (382-399, 139).

The period surrounding the last Jacobite rebellion in 1745, and with it the end of the threat of the re-emergence of an English Catholic monarchy, witnessed a surge in anti-Catholic sentiment which persisted in various forms. This sentiment reflected sincere identification with England’s Protestant past as well as Puritan values that ignited the Reformation and later spread to America. The widespread feeling involved distrust, among many other things, of theatricality, or any semblance of what many Protestants viewed as the Catholic Church’s idolatry of images and relics. Such fears also arose partly out of aristocratic fears that a return of Roman power would herald the loss of those establishments (abbeys and castles) which many Protestant English families had called their homes since Henry VIII’s disestablishment, as well as more widespread fears of a return to the autocratic forms of divine rights monarchy (Miles 16-17). Anti-Catholic sentiment revived and strengthened during the years of the revolutionary foreign wars, culminating, along with fears of invasion, in a pervasive conservative backlash to the events of the French Revolution. The emergence of Gothic fiction during this era is often seen as an expression of the massive dislocation and threats to security that characterized political and cultural experience during this time in the form of coded critiques of power and domination at a time when direct political critique was punished as treason.

The atmosphere in the American colonies was no less volatile as the First Continental Congress began calling for the liberation of America from England. Gothic novels and dramas from England appealed to American audiences because they provided sensationalist entertainment but also because they narrated stories of vulnerability and conflict with which the young nation could identify. Haywood notes that for immigrants and citizens, America was synonymous with “freedom and democracy which were still unobtainable in Britain” (139). However, noting the conflicts inherent in the young nation’s emergence, he also points out that American citizens “found it difficult to reconcile the image of America the pristine nation . . . with the violence of its history, the horrors of war . . . the continuing existence of chattel slavery . . . and the perilous fate of its indigenous peoples” (139-40). Instability and insecurity prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic as citizens of England and America experienced conditions of uncertainty and confusion that in themselves could only be described as Gothic.

Gothic fiction and drama, then, arose within the context of profound cultural turmoil. Critics have argued a number of angles from which the Gothic may be considered, citing the influence of a steadily rising middle class in England and America as well as a need for relatively safe forms of transgression as a method of questioning laws and morality that were seen by many as oppressive and an outcome of the conservative backlash that attended the revolutions and other less violent but nonetheless turbulent changes. As Maggie Kilgour notes, “the gothic is part of the reaction against the political, social, scientific, industrial, epistemological revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which enabled the rise of the middle class” (10-11). However, Gothic fiction did more than just react to these revolutions, it also projected ideal forms of citizenship and social relations that would result in a stable society that fostered well-being. Paula Backscheider states that “to become mass art, literature must appeal enough to become popular; to do this, it must speak to the hopes and fears of its audience at a particular moment in their history even as it does what popular art always does: entertain” (166). The Gothic did precisely that, critiquing the forces that destabilized society while presenting characters who could morally uplift the world. Though novels and drama enjoyed success in the decades preceding the eighteenth century, a single genre had never before garnered so much attention in itself. From 1760 to the early nineteenth century, the Gothic novel and drama enjoyed such success that Gothic can be considered, as Backscheider does, the Western world’s first popular culture phenomenon (166).

Essential to the Gothic’s ability to obtain and sustain its audience’s attention is its involvement in defining and arguing the boundaries between morality and transgression, and conformity and subversion regarding cultural categories and individual identities. Fred Botting argues that “from the eighteenth century onwards, Gothic texts have been involved in constructing and contesting distinctions between civilization and barbarism, reason and desire, self and other” (20). One of the ways that the Gothic could safely and effectively comment on contested aspects of English society, such as politics, education, religion, gender, and class in this era of instability was to position its critiques in terms of historically and geographically distant events and locations. Openly suggesting King George III was an insane autocrat would have been treason; however, commenting on the misdeeds of a foreign government or ruler from Italy or France two centuries earlier was perfectly acceptable. The Gothic, with its seemingly stock characters and recycled scenes, is actually situated and dynamic, reflecting specific fears and uncertainties that characterize the cultural milieu from which the work arises. Davison asserts:

“Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary history is only truly rendered comprehensible when the Gothic, a middle class and often feminized form, is positioned in its legitimate place, examined as an aesthetic development in its own right, and recognized for its exceptional and enduring contributions to literary history” (14).

Gothic fiction not only contested patriarchal gender ideals, but it also threatened patriarchal control over those ideals through its immense success as a genre. The rapidly growing female reading public, Botting suggests, starved for representations of female experiences, forced the control of literary production “away from the guardians of taste . . . much to the chagrin of those interested in maintaining an exclusive set of literary values” (47). In other words, men—especially clergymen—began to lose influence regarding the production and consumption of literary texts due to women’s increasing demand for romances. Botting points out that increased availability of all kinds of texts as a result of cheaper printing processes and the rise of circulating libraries meant that the “reading public included larger numbers of readers from the middle class, especially women,” and reflected England’s shift in cultural power from “an aristocratic and landed minority” to the middle classes (46). Despite cautionary warnings of the dangerous effects of fiction and romance by the clergy and other concerned with moral degeneration in turbulent times, the increasing ease with which women were able to obtain and read romances made it impossible to diminish what E.J. Clery describes as “the threat of female consumption of passion,” which she suggests “could only be nullified by a change in attitudes” (18). She points out that only gradually “through the early years of the nineteenth century” did romances come to be considered as “harmless escapism, unlikely to be confused with reality” (18).

A Gothic Education

An additional form of support for the Gothic arose from then-current moral theories that sought to ally art to the cause of perfectibility, an important issue during the early years of the modern liberal project that involved rationalizing power and authority after regicide and abdication, particularly by way of supporting claims to individual autonomy. Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782), a judge in the supreme courts of Scotland and a prominent writer, disagreed with those who saw in fine art, including literature, threats to moral and social order. He outlined an aesthetic theory in 1761 that involved a dynamic that he called “ideal presence,” intended to impress upon the newly crowned King George III the importance of patronizing the arts, especially modern literature, for the moral and political betterment of England. Building on moral sense theories regarding sympathy and benevolence, Kames defines ideal presence as a mode of being that occurs when one experiences sublimity and beauty and thus becomes susceptible to moral improvement. He argued that “the power of fiction to generate passion is an admirable contrivance, subservient to excellent purposes” (88). Kames credits ideal presence with the power to solidify social bonds:

In appearance at least, what can be more slight than ideal presence? and yet from it is derived that extensive influence which language hath over the heart; and influence, which, more than any other means, strengthens the bond of society, and attracts individuals from their private system to perform acts of generosity and benevolence . . .  For when events are related in a lively manner, and every circumstance appears as passing before us, we suffer not patiently the truth of the facts to be questioned” (100).

He suggests, then, that art has a distinct role in producing moral effects. Robert Miles describes Kames’ concept of ideal presence as a process by which, in “our repeated surrendering to pleasurable reverie” through reading or the enjoyment of the arts, “we rehearse moral scenes: impressions are re-iterated, warmth infused, and the lesson imprinted” (15). In short, we are morally and spiritually improved through the repeated arousal of the senses that occurs when we engage with art.

Kames’s description of the effects of art, however, points out one of the main reasons that many took issue with the Gothic and with Lewis’ The Monk in particular. Their opinion was, according to Botting, that Gothic’s “style seduces readers, leads them astray and leaves them unable to distinguish between virtue and vice and thereby expel the latter” (83). At issue was whether Gothic was teaching the “right” things. Gothic novels and dramas of the eighteenth century often feature women protagonists who experience terror at the thought of being married to a villain, kidnapped, imprisoned, or even murdered. The finer distinctions regarding the moral effects of Gothic fear thus provide another important focus for scholars of the Gothic. Botting, for example, elaborates on Kames’, Radcliffe’s, and others’ ideas about terror and horror, arguing that though the terms “are often used synonymously, distinctions can be made between them as countervailing aspects of Gothic emotional ambivalence. If terror leads to an imaginative expansion of one’s sense of self, horror describes the movement of contraction and recoil” (10). Botting’s observations suggest that not only are the types of emotions that Gothic represents and elicits critical to its effects, but that it is equally important that the characters’ actions match the emotion being elicited. In other words, Gothic novels aimed at moral improvement avoid featuring a virtuous action taking place during a moment of horror, which would result in a reader’s recoil rather than imaginative expansion. Such was and is the issue with Lewis’ tale, a romance that, according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale” (188).

In addition to excerpts from Lewis’ The Monk , the other novels excerpted in this section—Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Beckford’s Vathek —represent not only the evolution of Gothic literature during this period of immense popularity but also the variety authors of the genre were able to achieve while still remaining within the otherwise strict confines of a largely formulaic genre. Walpole provides in The Castle of Otranto the first complete example of a Gothic novel from which later authors, took their cues. Beckford illustrates the malleability of the genre and its ability to be employed even as a mode or aspect within a larger piece of fiction since Vathek, as Thomas Keymer describes in “poised enigmatically between multiple possibilities—from oriental fantasy to punitive fable, from arch comedy to gothic sublime” (xxix).  Finally, Lewis offers a view both of what makes Gothic literature so intriguing and so possibly dangerous while Coleridge’s review of the novel helps illustrate the fear people felt at the widespread popularity of The Monk and other Gothic tales. However diverse, in these texts, we find just a few of the seeds that would ultimately grow into the works of today’s writers of horror and psychological thrillers in both text and film.

Works Cited

Backscheider, Paula. Spectacular Politics . Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

Baldick, Chris, and Robert Mighall. “Gothic Criticism.” T he New Companion to the Gothic , edited by David Punter, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 267-87.

Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom . Routledge, 1996.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by Adam Phillips, Oxford UP, 2008.

Clery, E.J. Women’s Gothic: from Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley . 2nd ed., Northcote House, 2004.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Review of The Monk (1797).” Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook, 1700-1820 , edited by E.J. Clery and Robert Miles, Manchester UP, 2000, pp. 185-89.

Davison, Carol Margaret. Gothic Literature, 1764-1824 . U of Wales P, 2009.

Haywood, Ian. Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation , 1776-1832. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Hogle, Jerrold E. “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. 1-20.

Home, Henry, Lord Kames. Elements of Criticism . 6th ed., Garland, 1972.

Keymer, Thomas. Introduction. Vathek , by William Beckford. Oxford UP, 201, pp. ix-xxix.

Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel . Routledge, 1995.

McKeon, Michael. “Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel.” Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach , edited by Michael McKeon, Johns Hopkins UP, 2000, pp. 382-99.

Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing, 1750-1820: A Genealogy . Manchester UP, 2002.

Ringe, Donald. American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction . UP of Kentucky, 1982.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions . Methuen, 1980.

Spector, Robert. The English Gothic: A Bibliographic Guide to Writers from Horace Walpole to Mary Shelley. Greenwood, 1984.

Varnado, S.L. Haunted Presence: T he Numinous in Gothic Fiction . U of Alabama P, 1987.

A Guide to the Gothic Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Gray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Gothic Fiction History: Horror Stories With Dark and Threatening Atmosphere Essay

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Introduction

The sublime in gothic fiction, the element of supernaturalism, mystery horror and suspense in gothic fiction and their significant utility, important elements in gothic fiction, gothic fiction as fantastic literature.

It is accurate to say that a gothic horror story is defined as a frightening story that has echoes of the past and has a constant theme of gloom and the supernatural, which makes it dark and rather threatening. From any perspective and point of view, gothic fiction cannot be dismissed as merely escapist and sensational on the basis that it is more than having only these two elements in it. There are many useful prospective insights which cannot be termed and delimited to mere sensational and escapist ones.

Science fiction is fiction based and claims scientific discoveries and often deals with convincing technological events, such as, space travel or life on other planets. By taking into account the definitions of the attributes, you can clearly see that one of the criteria for a gothic horror story is the use of light and darkness to create a sinister atmosphere.

In the beginning of gothic fiction era, it was not long after the translation of mythological texts that artists began experimenting with ways to elevate and transport their audiences with the use of the sublime. One group in particular began using the ideas of terror, death, and the supernatural, in combination with that which is terrible in nature to create the sublime. This group became known as the “Graveyard Poets” or the “Graveyard School”. On why these poems are effective author Fred Botting (2001:39) states, “the awful obscurity of the settings of Graveyard poetry elevate the mind to ideas of wonder and divinity”. In other words it’s the sublime imagery that produces the required effect.

“Graveyard Poetry” became increasingly popular during the early 1700’s, and paved the way for what would officially become “Gothic” literature. It was not long before the sublime idea of terrible nature grew until it included even more of the supernatural such as fantastical beings, witchcraft, and other extraordinary phenomena (Kemp, 2001, WEB). These became the components that gave Gothic literature its very definition. The first author to utilize these elements in a large literary work was Horace Walpole in his novel, The Castle of Otranto. It was the first novel to receive the title of “Gothic”, and it was also one of the first to use and develop the sublime.

In the Preface to his second edition, Walpole strives to construct a structure by which the Gothic novel can be defined. He states that in Gothic texts, it is necessary to leave, “the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention, and thence of creating more interesting situations… to conduct the mortal agents… according to the rules of probability” (Walpole, 1964:7). In this description, Walpole is essentially offering a definition of the sublime as it is the sublime that elevates the “fancy” as it both fears and finds astonishment in the “boundless realms of invention”, but can delight in it as no real danger is found as it is “conducted” by “the rules of probability”. In this Walpole is demonstrating how the sublime is a necessary ingredient to the Gothic genre.

Burke defined precisely what is to be considered sublime. Some of the main Characteristics that Burke (1834) identified as ones that lead to sublimity include: obscurity, eternity and infinity, the crowded and the confused, power, vastness, magnificence, darkness, and excessiveness. He also points out that its nature that primarily conveys the sublime. These guidelines laid out by Burke became the structure by which all Gothic scenes were constructed. In this work, Burke also gave justification to the continuance of the Gothic genre as he identifies and highly emphasizes terror as being the ruling attribute of the sublime. He declares terror to be the “ruling principle” in the sublime as he states:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime (1834: 42).

However Burke does set down the limitation that the terror, “should have no idea of danger connected with it” as this would hinder the production of “delight” (1834:74). This lends an understanding to the Gothic text then, as it is the aim of the author of a Gothic text to produce terror so that it delights the reader (Hennelly, 2001, 19). The Gothic writers who came soon after Burke display how his ideas of the sublime greatly influenced their Gothic writing.

As more time has progressed and more thought given to the idea of the sublime, the Gothic has evolved, and has even produced a number of sub genres. In all of them, the sublime is a crucial element. As it is seen, this genre as a whole would not have been made possible if not for the sublime. Furthermore, without the sublime, a complete understanding of Gothic texts would be impossible.

While assessing this evolution, Richard Davenport-Hines pronounced, “Gothic is nothing if not hostile to progressive hopes”. The Gothic plot in Dorian Gray is ultimately hostile to the progressive hopes held out by the Paterian plot of self-actualization. (Davenport, 1998, 139)

Most of the gothic fiction involves the supernatural. The monster in “Frankenstein” and the vampire in “The Vampire of Kaldenstein” both have similar qualities. Both are obviously not human and look natural and strange. The creature is described as a “catastrophe” and his creator goes on to describe the monster in full. “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness, but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips”. This account of the monster really gives the reader a clear picture of how different the monster is. The vampire is described as “unusually tall, with a face of unnatural pallor”. The narrator also adds that the creature “cast no shadow”.

For the period of the closing years of the eighteenth century, England emerged and involved in the whirlpool of a collective unravelling. The contemporary philosophers provided the scholarly circles with such theories of inspiration and action that warranted their self-interested attitude and started to expose themselves as unendurable. The incongruity between the English philosophy in which “individual desires and collective needs participated in perfect reciprocity” (Clery, 2002, 35) and real political and economic circumstances commenced to facade.

It is out of this sociological environment that the Gothic novel emerged: an innovative, shocking and fearful genre for a prospective time. The phantom of communal uprising is obvious in the mystical “spectres” of the Gothic: a ghastly way of life emerges as a haunted and disintegrative Gothic mansion; the thrashing of English societal distinctiveness stands the Gothic hero or heroine’s quest for individuality.

Although, the Gothic is frequently reproached or even rejected for its excessively histrionic situations and absolutely expected plots, but the unbelievable attractiveness of the genre in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the regaining of gothic narratives within the past two decades, indicates to an elasticity that cannot be ignored.

The Gothic novel evolves onward rather abruptly as the rising obsession with individual awareness that starts in the early 18th century crash with the exceptional cultural apprehensions of the late 18th century. The sensations of the gothic fiction characters are exposed and externalized in a far-reaching new technique; their innermost fears and passions are literally modified as other characters, paranormal and weird phenomena, and yet lifeless objects. Simultaneously, the trait of the fright portrayed in these novels–fear of incarceration or snare, of individual breach and rape, of the victory of wickedness over good and pandemonium over order–appears to reproduce a particular historical time branded by growing disenchantment with illumination lucidity and by blood-spattered revolutions in France and America.

“The progressive myth of Frankenstein deserves the name of science-fiction, whereas Dracula can only be discarded as superstition fiction.” (Botting, 2001, 71) “We can account for Dracula’s success, and for its continuing success only in terms of the eternity of the opposition between Good and Evil, in terms of human nature, that is in the very terms in which the myth itself is couched — at the cost of dehistoricising the novel and the myth that has developed around it.

It is also unjust to the novel, by insisting on its obvious flaws, and neglecting the very qualities that have ensured its survival. For instance, Dracula, relying as it does on a multiplicity of texts and of points of view, is narratively more complex than Frankenstein, which is based on the traditional structure of embedded narratives; and to call it superstition-fiction means that we forget the advanced technology that amply compensates for the garlands of garlic — whereas Frankenstein’s bright idea was inspired by alchemy”. (Botting, 2001, 72)

The first factor included in a science fiction genre is the existence of aliens or strange creatures. The strange creature that was created in ‘Frankenstein’ was obviously the monster. “The Gothic, we find, as it enters the twentieth century just past, has performed an unusually intense enactment of the changing assumptions about signification that Baudrillard has traced in Western history since the fading of ‘the counterfeit’ from dominance.

In Frankenstein, the ghost of the counterfeit is shown giving way, as the culture did, to the sign as a manufacturable and mechanically reproducible ‘simulacrum’, the very next stage, the ‘industrial’ one, in our thinking about symbols.” (Botting, 2001, 157) The most vital criterion for a science fiction story is the connection with reality. It has to be relevant to earth or humanity and have something familiar that people can relate to.

Most of the theories developed to create the monster are realistic. Frankenstein has a combination of both elements which gives it a good diversity. The gothic component comes in mainly with the violence and romance, but the creation discovery is more science based. This makes ‘Frankenstein’ a good mix between the two genres, which makes the story more effective and helps it suit a wider audience. (Kilgour, 1997, 66)

A word or two should be said about the difference in meaning that the word ‘mystery’ has in American and British contexts. Writing of psychological ghost stories, Peter Penzoldt suggests that American authors prefer a natural explanation, while the English do not fear to intimate that there is more in the world than reason can account for. Glen Cavaliero, too, points to ‘the repeated tendency of English novelists to write about the supernatural or at any rate about mysterious and inexplicable events’. (Cavaliero, 1995, vi)

The Society considered its work in encouraging and directing restorations to be highly useful; yet none of its activities have been so offensive to succeeding generations. The encouragement which the Ecclesiologists gave to replacing medieval features by more ‘correct’ details was abused by many architects. But the Society must bear the responsibility for the wholesale destruction of great quantities of medieval art. Sir Kenneth Clark remarks: ‘It would be interesting to know if the Camden Society destroyed as much medieval architecture as Cromwell. If not it was from lack of funds, sancta paupertas, only true custodian of ancient buildings.’ (Clarke, 1962, p. 237)

The pattern of Gothic fiction, to a certain extent is the delineation of two apparently alternative spaces, the violation of boundaries between them, the overwhelming power of the more negative and deconstructive environment—is widely, almost universally shared by horror narratives, explicitly or inferentially. Horror narrative stresses the teleological implications of abjection; it is the ultimate literature of absence—from God, from substantial selfhood—and the ghost is its central character.

It is no wonder that Mary Shelley in Frankenstein parodies Paradise Lost; horror narrative records loss, paradise gone and certainly not to be regained. Kristeva goes on to note that “all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded” (Kristeva, 1982, 61). David Punter argues that “our knowledge of romantic-period Gothic drama can be informed by the politics of an increasingly plebeian theatre.” (Putner, 2000, 102)

The gothic genre, as with all genres, is made up of many elements and concepts resulting in a massively broad and varied spectrum; including the supernatural, the sublime and horror to name but a few of the more common and generally fundamental ones. Some concepts may be clearly overt, and others will be more discreetly manipulated, but nevertheless a gothic text will more often than not include many of these elements. In terms of the supernatural in the gothic genre, it generally appears in the form of some kind of other than natural being or object, such as a vampire or ghost, which is frightening due to its refusal to adhere to the laws of nature, God or man.

Returning to Frankenstein, it could be argued that there is no element of the supernatural, or alternatively that the creature is supernatural by virtue of its being a composition of dead parts then re-animated by ungodly means.( Kilgour, 1997, 69)

Elements of the supernatural may seem to be almost an obligatory component of the gothic tale. On a closer examination, the word itself suggests also a rather deeper level of meaning: beyond that of the natural, rationally explainable world. In this expanded sense the supernatural relates to another favourite gothic, and Romantic, concept: the sublime. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was a particularly influential treatise in this context, focussing on the human reaction to an overwhelming experience that transcends everyday normality.

It is hardly surprising that Burke’s words had such an impact, as they succinctly state what so much gothic art was striving for with greater or lesser degrees of success. “Whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested on every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in manner, annihilated before him.” (Burke, 1834, 41)

The mystical and religious connotations should be clear; gothic writers also noted the link between this overwhelming, oceanic sensation and some degree of horror. In gothic narratives there are abundant examples of supernatural and sublime elements, sometimes overt and sometimes less so. There is a useful distinction to be drawn between those authors who tend to leave the supernatural elements unresolved and those who seek rational closure through explaining the apparent mystery.

The two words ‘gothic’ and ‘horror’ seem to belong together, so close is their relationship. Horror however does not have to be present in a gothic text; neither does its presence necessarily make a text gothic. As Clive Bloom indicates; “Horror is the usual, but necessarily the main ingredient of gothic fiction and most gothic fiction is determined in its plotting by the need for horror and sensation. It was Gothicism, with its formality, codification, ritualistic elements and artifice……that transformed the old folk tale of terror into the modern horror story.” (Bloom, 1998, 110)

There are certain well-known definitions as regards to fantasy or the fantastic and all of these are worth considering. Eric Rabkin’s Fantastic in Literature (1976) deals largely with the same subject matter. This particular piece opens with an examination of Alice’s surprised response to the talking plants in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”. Rabkin argues that the fantastic mode is established through the reversal of the ground rules: as he says, “One of the key distinguishing marks of the fantastic is that the perspectives enforced by the ground rules of the narrative world must be diametrically contradicted.” (Rabkin, 1976, p.8)

Victor Sage, in his “Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition”, narrates the method in which, in the Pauline solace convention concerning the seventeenth century, the aging house implied and worked as a connotative metaphor for the body’s unavoidable decomposition and as a trope of mortality and decay in a wide-ranging implication. Sage, to further elaborate the case, refers to a seventeenth-century Huguenot content that, employing the house far-fetched simile, depicts the body assaulted and devastated by degenerative powers:

“Death labours to undermine this poor dwelling from the first moment that it is built, besieges it, and on all sides makes its approaches; in time it saps the foundation, it batters us with several diseases and unexpected accidents; every day it opens a breach, and pulls out of this building some stones.” (Sage, 1988, p.1)

In literature, for the reader to become oriented, they must search for clues as to the equilibrium of the setting. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the reactions of his characters provide the reader with a backdrop of that reality. When events start to go askew, we look to these characters to show us just how far askew. Utterson serves as a neutral facilitator to obtain for the reader this feedback. Stevenson first establishes these characters as reliable, and then relies on their reactionary movements (testimony and actions) to illustrate the intensity of man’s dual natures. It is in these reactions that the reader can discern just how ordinary or outlandish the actions committed by Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde really are.

It also offers an outlet for the comparison of Jekyll/Hyde’s actions to the morals and attitudes of society. The actions of the Hyde persona deviate greatly from what Stevenson has established through characters such as Poole and Dr. Lanyon as Jekyll’s basic nature.

We are shown that the divergence between the characters of Jekyll and Hyde is not a miniscule one, but capable of creating disarray and disbelief. It works as a perfect illustration, and further supports my point. Stevenson most definitely relies on the intensity of his characters’ reactions to emphasize the tremendously disparate natures of Jekyll and Hyde. It adds enormous depth and magnitude that would be lost if the reader were only shown Jekyll and Hyde’s actions, but not the reactions yielded by them. (Attack, 2003, 90) We are also shown much about the balance of the world Stevenson created for his novel. Clearly, the balance has been thrown off.

The characters react with fear and terror at this maelstrom of reality gone asunder. Stevenson valiantly achieves this effect solely by demonstrating these reactions. Were we simply shown Hyde’s actions, and then informed that Hyde was acting in ways incongruent from Jekyll’s normal behaviour the effect would be nowhere near as poignant.

The Gothic fiction cannot be assumed or declared as escapist genre of literature rather it is filled with hidden eroticism that drags the reader into a daemonic and antiquated womb which is manifestly the author’s. The partisanship of the text and the reader is reduced by the hypothetical genuineness of the author’s objective.

The soundness of the text is thus focussed to a critic’s words not the incidence of the reader. Amplifying the Gothic, psychoanalysis seems to be late gothic story that has risen to help describe twentieth-century knowledge of contradictory aloofness from the panic of others and the precedent. This relevance of language eliminates the reader from the gothic fiction text. The text has unexpectedly become a caldron of depraved sensationalism contrasted with voyeurism and exhibitionism emphasized transvestism that demarcates the misuse of Christian moralism.

The Gothic fiction has had a massive effect and influence on many genres of literature since its beginning in the middle seventeenth century. Attractiveness of the Gothic genre has progressively amplified as the mistrust of the legends of the Age of Reason has been reached us. Nevertheless, literary criticism of the past as well as present has been dawdling to recognize the Gothic as a valid genre. Previously critics have traced the immensity of Gothic to revitalize a putrefying genre, but at present modern critics have found to shed new orientation into this literary mystery by diverse literary perspectives. Numerous opinions through the years have evaluated, but the most noteworthy of them is the psychoanalytical approach.

This strives to relate Freudian, Jungian, and post-Jungian notion and words to the Gothic text. Nonetheless, by implementing this perspective to a text it gives emancipation to the hazard of misreading a text. This assumption rules out the reader from the text whereas striking the author back into it. This decreases the soundness of the text by imagining the target of the author. Such readings and involving of literary tools concentrate on extraneous features of the text and lessen it to a medium to maintain ideas not in the actual text.

One of the reasons that this always has been, still is, and always will be one of the best examples of horror/gothic fiction, is because it exploits the universal disgust at human corpses. Whether they are whole, in pieces, fresh or decaying, it is safe to assume that almost anyone would be horrified and disgusted at the sight of them. Because Victor ‘dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave’ to gain body parts to create the monster, the monster is imagined, even with no further description, as hideously ugly, revolting, and probably unfeeling. This initial assumption definitely adds to the horror of the story, and also adds to the sympathy we perhaps feel later in the novel for the monster, at the way people judge him so cruelly.

Descriptions are highly detailed and create a vivid picture; often so detailed they could form a comprehensive travel guide. Conversely, as we move from Walton’s point of view to that of Victor these locations are made strange and foreign by the use of highly melodramatic and emotive language, ‘But it was augmented… the habitations of another race of beings’ , a practice common in both gothic and melodramatic writing.

The landscapes encountered are wild, barren and untamed and we move through a world of extremes; from the towering majesty of the Alps, via the wind swept remoteness of the Orkneys, to the barren wasteland of the Arctic and each step in Victor’s journey echoes his deteriorating sanity. This, combined with Shelley’s use of the weather to evoke a dark and brooding atmosphere overlies the narrative with an implication of the paranormal, leaving the reader always aware of a sensation of impeding doom.

The Creature is driven to his later actions by the behaviour of those around him and by a society who apportions worth on physical appearance and social standing. Where the Creature would give only love and affection, humanity gives him fear, repulsion and pain.

He is rejected by everyone, even by the old, blind elder De Lacy ‘Great God… Who are you’ but, even then, he retains his innate humanity. It is only after he is shot while saving the girl child from drowning that his personality begins to change ‘The feelings of kindness… gave place to hellish rage…’ and he begins to become the monster society perceives him to be. In responding to monstrous treatment he becomes monstrous.

Attack, Richard D., Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature, Norton, 2003. 89-91.

Bloom, C. (ed) Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond, 1998. Macmillan. 110.

Botting Fred – editor: The Gothic. Publisher: D.S. Brewer. Cambridge, England. 2001. 39, 71, 72, 156-57.

Burke, Edmund: The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke: With a Biographical and Critical Introduction. New York Public Library; 1834: Vol 1. p. 40-43, 74.

Cavaliero, Glen. The Supernatural and English Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. vi.

Clark Sir Kenneth. The Gothic Revival: an Essay in the History of Taste. (Revised and Enlarged Edition; London: Constable, 1962.) p.237.

Clery, E.J. (2002) ‘The Genesis of “Gothic” Fiction.’ In: Hogle, J.E. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge Press. 34-36.

Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin. New York: North Point Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1998. 139.

Hennelly, M.M. (2001) ‘Framing the Gothic: From Pillar to Post- Structuralism’ College Literature 28(3), pp. 15-26.

Hogle, J.E. (ed) the Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 2003. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. 243.

Kemp, J. (2001) A Glossary of Literary Gothic Terms. Web.

Kilgour, M. The Rise of the Gothic Novel, 1997. Routledge: London. 66-70.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. p.61.

Punter, David. Ed. A Companion to the Gothic. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000: 94–106.

Rabkin Eric. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976. p.8.

Shelley. M., 1998, Frankenstein (1818 Text), Oxford University Press, Reading.

Stevenson, Robert Louis; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Signet Classics), Signet Book; Reprint edition (1994).

Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (Macmillan, 1988) p. 1.

Walpole, H. (1964) The Castle of Otranto; A Gothic Story. London: Oxford University Press. p7.

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IvyPanda. (2021, September 7). Gothic Fiction History: Horror Stories With Dark and Threatening Atmosphere. https://ivypanda.com/essays/gothic-fiction-history/

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Bibliography

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An Overview of Gothic Fiction

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Gothic Novels and Novelists

Gothic Novels and Novelists

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 11, 2019 • ( 6 )

The gothic novel is a living tradition, a form that enjoys great popular appeal while provoking harsh critical judgments. It began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), then traveled through Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Brockden Brown, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and many others into the twentieth century, where it surfaced, much altered and yet spiritually continuous, in the work of writers such as William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, John Gardner (1933-1982), Joyce Carol Oates, and Doris Lessing and in the popular genres of horror fiction and some women’s romances.

The externals of the gothic, especially early in its history, are characterized by sublime but terrifying mountain scenery; bandits and outlaws; ruined, ancient seats of power; morbid death imagery; and virgins and charismatic villains, as well as hyperbolic physical states of agitation and lurid images of physical degradation. Its spirit is characterized by a tone of high agitation and unresolved or almost-impossible-to-resolve anxiety, fear, unnatural elation, and desperation.

The first gothic novel is identifiable with a precision unusual in genre study. Walpole (1717-1797), the earl of Orford, began writing The Castle of Otranto in June, 1764,; he finished it in August and published it in an edition of five hundred copies in early 1765. Walpole was a historian and essayist whose vivid and massive personal correspondence remains essential reading for the eighteenth century background. Before writing The Castle of Otranto , his only connection with the gothic was his estate in Twickenham, which he called Strawberry Hill. It was built in the gothic style and set an architectural trend, as his novel would later set a literary trend.

Walpole did not dream of what he was about to initiate with The Castle of Otranto ; he published his first edition anonymously, revealing his identity, only after the novel’s great success, in his second edition of April, 1765. At that point, he no longer feared mockery of his tale of a statue with a bleeding nose and mammoth, peregrinating armor, and an ancient castle complete with ancient family curse. With his second edition, he was obliged to add a preface explaining why he had hidden behind the guise of a preface proclaiming the book to be a “found manuscript,” printed originally “in Naples in the black letter in 1529.” The reader of the first edition was told that The Castle of Otranto was the long-lost history of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. The greater reading public loved it, and it was reprinted in many editions. By 1796, it had been translated into French and Spanish and had been repeatedly rendered into dramatic form. In 1848, the novel was still active as the basis for successful theatrical presentations, although the original gothic vogue had passed.

Close upon Walpole’s heels followed Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin. These three authors, of course, were not the only imitators ready to take advantage of the contemporary trend (there were literally hundreds of those), but they are among the few who are still read, for they made their own distinctive contributions to the genre’s evolution. Radcliffe (1764-1823) was born just as Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto was being published. She was reared in a middle-class milieu, acquainted with merchants and professionals; her husband was the editor of The English Chronicle and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She lived a quiet life, was likely asthmatic, and seems to have stayed close to her hearth. Although she never became a habitué of literary circles and in her lifetime only published a handful of works, she is considered the grande dame of the gothic novelists and enjoyed a stunning commercial success in her day; she is the only female novelist of the period whose work is still read.

Radcliffe’s works include The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian: Or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents  (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville (1826). She also wrote an account of a trip through parts of northern Europe, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795). Her remarkably sedate life contrasts strikingly with the melodramatic flamboyance of her works. Her experiences also fail to account for her dazzling, fictional accounts of the scenery of Southern Europe, which she had never seen.

Lewis, called Monk Lewis in honor of his major work, conformed in his life more closely to the stereotype of the gothic masters. Lewis (1775-1818) was a child of the upper classes, the spoiled son of a frivolous beauty, whom he adored. His parents’ unhappy marriage ended when he was at Westminster Preparatory School. There was a continual struggle between his parents to manage his life—his father stern and aloof, his mother extravagant and possessive.

Lewis spent his childhood treading the halls of large, old manses belonging both to family and to friends. He paced long, gloomy corridors—a staple of the gothic— and peered up at ancient portraits in dark galleries, another permanent fixture in gothic convention. Deeply involved with the literati of his day, Lewis (also homosexual) found an equivocal public reception, but his novel The Monk: A Romance (1796; also known as Ambrosio: Or, The Monk ), an international sensation, had an enormous effect on the gothic productions of his day. Lewis died on board ship, a casualty of a yellowfever epidemic, in the arms of his valet, Baptista, and was buried at sea.

Lewis’s bibliography is as frenetic as his biography. Although his only gothic novel is the infamous The Monk , he spent most of his career writing plays heavily influenced by gothic conventions; he also translated many gothic works into English and wrote scandalous poetry. Among his plays are Village Virtues (pb. 1796), The Castle Spectre (pr. 1797), The East Indian (pr. 1799), Adelmorn the Outlaw (pr., pb. 1801), and The Captive (pr. 1803). He translated Friedrich Schiller’s The Minister (1797) and August von Kotzebue’s Rolla: Or, The Peruvian Hero (1799). He became notorious for his poetic work The Love of Gain: A Poem Initiated from Juvenal  (1799), an imitation of Juvenal’s thirteenth satire.

Maturin (1780-1824) is the final major gothic artist of the period. He was a Protestant clergyman from Dublin and a spiritual brother of the Marquis de Sade. He also was a protégé of Sir Walter Scott and an admirer of Lord Byron. His major gothic novel is Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), as shocking to its public as was Lewis’s The Monk . An earlier Maturin gothic was Fatal Revenge: Or, The Family of Montorio (1807). His other works include the novel The Milesian Chief (1812); a theological novel, Women: Or, Pour et Contre (1818); a tragedy, Bertram: Or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (pr., pb. 1816), produced by Edmund Kean; and the novel The Albigenses  (1824).

Among the legions of other gothic novelists, a few writers (especially the following women, who are no longer generally read) have made a place for themselves in literary history. These writers include Harriet Lee, known for The Canterbury Tales (1797-1805), written with her sister, Sophia Lee, author also of The Recess: Or, A Tale of Other Times (1783); Clara Reeve ( The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story , 1777; also known as The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story ); Regina Maria Roche ( The Children of the Abbey , 1796); Charlotte Smith ( Emmeline: Or, The Orphan of the Castle—A Novel , 1788); Charlotte Dacre ( Zofloya: Or, The Moor— A Romance of the Fifteenth Century , 1806); and Mary Anne Radcliffe ( Manfroné: Or, The One Handed Monk— A Romance , 1809).

Critics generally agree that the period gothics, while having much in common, divide into relatively clear subclassifications: the historical gothic, the school of terror, and the Schauer-Romantik school of horror. All gothics of the period return to the past, are flushed with suggestions of the supernatural, and tend to be set amid ruined architecture, particularly a great estate house gone to ruin or a decaying abbey. All make use of stock characters. These will generally include one or more young and innocent virgins of both sexes; monks and nuns, particularly of sinister aspect; and towering male and female characters of overpowering will whose charismatic egotism knows no bounds.

Frequently the novels are set in the rugged mountains of Italy and contain an evil Italian character. Tumultuous weather often accompanies tumultuous passions. The gothic genre specializes in making external conditions metaphors of human emotions, a convention thought to have been derived in part from the works of William Shakespeare. Brigands are frequently employed in the plot, and most gothics of the period employ morbid, lurid imagery, such as a body riddled with worms behind a moldy black veil.

The various subdivisions of the gothic may feature any or all of these conventions, being distinguished by relative emphasis. The historical gothic, for example, reveals the supernatural against a genuinely historical background, best exemplified by the works of the Lee sisters, who, although their own novels are infrequently read today, played a part in the evolution of the historical novel through their influence on Sir Walter Scott. The school of terror provided safe emotional titillation— safe, because the morbidity such novels portray takes place not in a genuine, historical setting, but in some fantasy of the past, and because the fearful effects tend to be explained away rationally at the end of the respective work. Radcliffe is the major paradigm of this subgroup. The Schauer-Romantik school of horror, best represented by Lewis and Maturin, did not offer the reassurance of a moral, rational order. These works tend to evoke history but stir anxiety without resolving or relieving it. They are perverse and sadistic, marked by the amoral use of thrill.

There are very few traditional gothic plots and conventions; a discrete set of such paradigms was recycled and refurbished many times. Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Lewis’s The Monk, and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer represent the basic models of the genre.

Castle of Otranto

The Castle of Otranto , emphatically not historical gothic, takes place in a fantasy past. It is not of the school of terror either; although it resolves its dilemmas in a human fashion, it does not rationally explain the supernatural events it recounts. This earliest of the gothics trembles between horror and terror.

The story opens with Manfred, Prince of Otranto, ready to marry his sickly son, Conrad, to the beautiful Isabella. Manfred, the pattern for future gothic villains of towering egotism and pride, is startled when his son is killed in a bizarre fashion. The gigantic statuary helmet of a marble figure of Alphonse the Good has been mysteriously transported to Manfred’s castle, where it has fallen on and crushed Conrad.

Manfred precipitously reveals that he is tired of his virtuous wife, Hippolita, and, disdaining both her and their virtuous daughter, Mathilda, attempts to force himself on the exquisite, virginal Isabella, his erstwhile daughter-in-law elect. At the same time, he attempts to blame his son’s death on an individual named Theodore, who appears to be a virtuous peasant lad and bears an uncanny resemblance to the now helmetless statue of Alfonso the Good. Theodore is incarcerated in the palace but manages to escape. Theodore and Isabella, both traversing the mazelike halls of Otranto to escape Manfred, find each other, and Theodore manages to set Isabella free. She finds asylum in the Church of St. Nicholas, site of the statue of Alfonso the Good, under the protection of Father Jerome, a virtuous friar. In the process of persuading Jerome to bring Isabella to him, Manfred discovers that Theodore is actually Jerome’s long-lost son. Manfred threatens Theodore in order to maneuver Jerome into delivering Isabella. The long-lost relative later became a popular feature of the gothic.

Both Isabella and Theodore are temporarily saved by the appearance of a mysterious Black Knight, who turns out to be Isabella’s father and joins the forces against Manfred. A round of comings and goings through tunnels, hallways, and churches ensues. This flight through dark corridors also became almost mandatory in gothic fiction. In the course of his flight, Theodore falls in love with Mathilda. As the two lovers meet in a church, Manfred, “flushed with love and wine,” mistakes Mathilda for Isabella. Wishing to prevent Theodore from possessing the woman he thinks is his own beloved, Manfred mistakenly stabs his daughter. Her dying words prevent Theodore from revenging her: “Stop thy impious hand . . . it is my father!”

Manfred must now forfeit his kingdom for his bloody deed. The final revelation is that Theodore is actually the true Prince of Otranto, the direct descendant of Alfonso the Good. The statuary helmet flies back to the statue; Isabella is given to Theodore in marriage, but only after he completes a period of mourning for Mathilda; and order is restored. The flight of the helmet remains beyond the pale of reason, as does the extraordinary, rigid virtue of the sympathetic characters, but Manfred’s threat to the kingdom is ended. Here is the master plot for the gothic of the Kingdom

The Mysteries of Udolpho

Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho presents apparently unnatural behavior and events but ultimately explains them all. Not only will the sins of the past be nullified, but also human understanding will penetrate all the mysteries. In The Mysteries of Udolpho , the obligatory gothic virgin is Emily St. Aubert; she is complemented by a virginal male named Valancourt, whom Emily meets while still in the bosom of her family. When her parents die, she is left at the mercy of her uncle, the villainous Montoni, dark, compelling, and savage in pursuit of his own interests. Montoni whisks Emily away to Udolpho, his great house in the Apennines, where, desperate for money, he exerts himself on Emily in hopes of taking her patrimony while his more lustful, equally brutal friends scheme against her virtue. Emily resists, fainting and palpitating frequently. Emily’s propensity to swoon is very much entrenched in the character of the gothic heroine.

Emily soon escapes and, sequestered in a convent, makes the acquaintance of a dying nun, whose past is revealed to contain a murder inspired by lust and greed. Her past also contains Montoni, who acquired Udolpho through her evil deeds. Now repenting, the nun (née Laurentini de Udolpho) reveals all. The innocent victim of Laurentini’s stratagems was Emily’s long-lost, virtuous aunt, and Udolpho should have been hers. Ultimately, it will belong to Emily and Valancourt.

Radcliffe was known to distinguish between horror and terror and would have none of the former. Terror was a blood-tingling experience of which she approved because it would ultimately yield to better things. Horror she identified with decadence, a distemper in the blood that could not be discharged but rendered men and women inactive with fright. Lewis’s The Monk demonstrates Radcliffe’s distinction.

Lewis’s The Monk concerns a Capuchin friar named Ambrosio, famed throughout Madrid for his beauty and virtue. He is fervent in his devotion to his calling and is wholly enchanted by a picture of the Virgin, to which he prays. A young novice of the order named Rosario becomes Ambrosio’s favorite. Rosario is a beautiful, virtuous youth, as Ambrosio thinks, but one night Ambrosio perceives that Rosario has a female breast, and that “he” is in fact “she”: Mathilda, a daughter of a noble house, so enthralled by Ambrosio that she has disguised herself to be near him.

Mathilda is the very image of the picture of the Virgin to which Ambrosio is so devoted, and, through her virginal beauty, seduces Ambrosio into a degrading sexual entanglement that is fully described. As Mathilda grows more obsessed with Ambrosio, his ardor cools. To secure him to her, she offers help in seducing Antonia, another virginal beauty, Ambrosio’s newest passion. Mathilda, the madonna-faced enchantress, now reveals that she is actually a female demon. She puts her supernatural powers at Ambrosio’s disposal, and together they successfully abduct Antonia, although only after killing Antonia’s mother. Ambrosio then rapes Antonia in the foul, suffocating stench of a charnel house in the cathedral catacombs. In this scene of heavy breathing and sadism, the monk is incited to his deed by the virginal Antonia’s softness and her pleas for her virtue. Each tear excites him further into a frenzy, which he climaxes by strangling the girl.

Ambrosio’s deeds are discovered, and he is tried by an inquisitorial panel. Mathilda reveals his union with Satan through her. The novel ends with Satan’s liberation of Ambrosio from the dungeon into which the inquisitors have thrown him. Satan mangles Ambrosio’s body by throwing him into an abyss but does not let him die for seven days (the de-creation of the world?). During this time, Ambrosio must suffer the physical and psychological torments of his situation, and the reader along with him. The devil triumphs at the end of this novel. All means of redressing virtue are abandoned, and the reader is left in the abyss with Ambrosio.

Melmoth the Wanderer

The same may be said of Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer , a tale of agony and the failure of redemption. The book may be called a novel only if one employs the concept of the picaresque in its broadest sense. It is a collection of short stories, each centering on Melmoth, a damned, Faust-like character. Each tale concerns Melmoth’s attempt to find someone to change places with him, a trade he would gladly make, as he has sold his soul to the devil and now wishes to be released.

The book rubs the reader’s nerves raw with obsessive suffering, detailing scenes from the Spanish Inquisition that include the popping of bones and the melting of eyeballs. The book also minutely details the degradation of a beautiful, virginal island maiden named Immalee, who is utterly destroyed by the idolatrous love of Melmoth. The last scene of the book ticks the seconds of the clock as Melmoth, unable to find a surrogate, awaits his fall into Satan’s clutches. The denouement is an almost unbearable agony that the reader is forced to endure with the protagonist. Again the horror is eternal. There will never be any quietus for either Ambrosio or Melmoth, or for the reader haunted by them. These are the molds for the gothic of damnation.

The Modernization of the Gothic

The reading public of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was avid for both horror and terror, as well as for supernatural history. Such works were gobbled greedily as they rolled off the presses. Indeed, the readers of the gothic may have begun the mass marketing of literature by ensuring the fortunes of the private lending libraries that opened in response to the gothic binge. Although the libraries continued after the gothic wave had crested, it was this craze that gave the libraries their impetus. Such private lending libraries purchased numerous copies of long lists of gothic works and furnished subscribers with a list from which they might choose. Like contemporary book clubs, the libraries vied for the most appetizing authors. Unlike the modern clubs, books circulated back and forth, not to be kept by subscribers.

William Lane’s Minerva Public Library was the most famous and most successful of all these libraries. Lane went after the works of independent gothic authors but formed the basis of his list by maintaining his own stable of hacks. The names of most of the “stable authors” are gone, and so are their books, but the titles linger on in the library records, echoing one another and the titles of the more prominent authors: The Romance Castle (1791), The Black Forest: Or, The Cavern of Horrors (1802), The Mysterious Omen: Or, Awful Retribution (1812).

By the time Melmoth the Wanderer had appeared, this trend had run its course. Only hacks continued to mine the old pits for monks, nuns, fainting innocents, Apennine banditti, and Satanic quests, but critics agree that if the conventions of the gothic period from Walpole to Maturin have dried out and fossilized, the spirit is very much alive. Many modern novels set miles from an abbey and containing not one shrieking, orphaned virgin or worm-ridden corpse may be considered gothic. If the sophisticated cannot repress a snicker at the obvious and well-worn gothic conventions, they cannot dismiss the power and attraction of its spirit, which lives today in serious literature.

Modern thinking about gothic literature has gravitated toward the psychological aspects of the gothic. The castle or ruined abbey has become the interior of the mind, racked with anxiety and unbridled surges of emotion, melodramatically governed by polarities. The traditional gothic is now identified as the beginning of neurotic literature. In a perceptive study of the genre, Love, Misery, and Mystery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (1978), Coral Ann Howells points out that the gothic literature of the eighteenth century was willing to deal with the syntax of hysteria, which the more prestigious literature, controlled by classical influences, simply denied or avoided. Hysteria is no stranger to all kinds of literature, but thinking today seeks to discriminate between the literary presentation of hysteria or neuroticism as an aberration from a rational norm and the gothic presentation of neuroticism as equally normative with rational control, or even as the dominant mode.

The evolution of the modern gothic began close to the original seedbed, in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for example, the traditional sins of the gothic past cavort in a mansion of ancient and noble lineage. A young virgin is subjected to the tortures of the charnel house; the tomb and the catacombs descend directly from Lewis. So, too, do the hyperbolic physical states of pallor and sensory excitement. This tale is also marked, however, by the new relationship it seeks to demonstrate between reason and hysterical anxiety.

Roderick Usher’s boyhood friend, the story’s narrator, is a representative of the normative rational world. He is forced to encounter a reality in which anxiety and dread are the norm and in which the passions know no rational bounds. Reason is forced to confront the reality of hysteria, its horror, terror, and power. This new psychological development of the gothic is stripped of the traditional gothic appurtenances in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where there are neither swooning virgins nor charnel houses, nor ruined, once-great edifices, save the ruin of the narrator’s mind. The narrator’s uncontrollable obsessions both to murder and to confess are presented to stun the reader with the overwhelming force of anxiety unconditioned by rational analysis.

Thus, a more modern gothic focuses on the overturning of rational limits as the source of horror and dread, without necessarily using the conventional apparatus. More examples of what may be considered modern gothic can be found in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). Although Hawthorne was perfectly capable of using the conventional machinery of the gothic, as in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), he was one of the architects of the modern gothic. In Hawthorne’s forward-looking tales, certain combinations of personalities bond, as if they were chemical compounds, to form anxiety systems that cannot be resolved except by the destruction of all or part of the human configuration. In The Scarlet Letter (1850), for example, the configuration of Hester, Chillingsworth, and Dimmesdale forms an interlocking system of emotional destruction that is its own Otranto. The needs and social positions of each character in this trio impinge on one another in ways that disintegrate “normal” considerations of loyalty, courage, sympathy, consideration, and judgment. Hester’s vivacity is answered in Dimmesdale, whose violently clashing aloofness and responsiveness create for her a vicious cycle of fulfillment and rejection. Chillingsworth introduces further complications through another vicious cycle of confidence and betrayal. These are the catacombs of the modern gothic.

Another strand of the modern gothic can be traced to Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1979-1851). The novel was published just as the gothic genre was on the wane. Shelley’s story represents an important alternative for the gothic imagination. The setting in this work shifts from the castle to the laboratory, forming the gothic tributary of science fiction. Frankenstein reverses the anxiety system of the gothic from the past to the future. Instead of the sins of the fathers—old actions, old human instincts rising to blight the present—human creativity is called into question as the blight of the future. Frankenstein’s mind and laboratory are the gothic locus of “future fear,” a horror of the dark side of originality and birth, which may, as the story shows, be locked into a vicious cycle with death and sterility. A dread of the whole future of human endeavor pursues the reader in and out of the dark corridors of Frankenstein .

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) may be considered an example of a further evolution of the gothic. Here one finds a strong resurgence of the traditional gothic: the ruined castle, bandits ranging over craggy hills, the sins of the past attacking the life of the present, and swooning, morbidly detailed accounts of deaths. The attendant supernatural horror and the bloodletting of the vampires, their repulsive stench, and the unearthly attractiveness of Dracula’s vampire brides come right out of the original school of Schauer-Romantik horror. The utterly debilitating effect of the vampire on human will is, however, strong evidence for those critics who see the gothic tradition as an exploration of neurosis.

Stoker synthesizes two major gothic subclassifications in his work, thereby producing an interesting affirmation. Unlike the works of Radcliffe and her terror school, Dracula does not ultimately affirm the power of human reason, for it never explains away the supernatural. On the other hand, Stoker does not invoke his vampires as totally overwhelming forces, as in the horror school. Dracula does not present a fatalistic course of events through which the truth will not win out. Humankind is the agency of its salvation, but only through its affirmation of the power of faith. Reason is indeed powerless before Dracula, but Dr. Van Helsing’s enormous faith and the faith he inspires in others are ultimately sufficient to resolve gothic anxiety, without denying its terrifying power and reality.

The Gothic in the Twentieth Century and Later

Significantly, in the contemporary gothic, reason never achieves the triumph it briefly found through the terror school. Twentieth and twenty-first century gothic tends toward the Schauer-Romantik school of horror. Either it pessimistically portrays an inescapable, mindforged squirrel cage, or it optimistically envisions an apocalyptic release through faith, instinct, or imagination, the nonrational human faculties. For examples of both twentieth century gothic trends, it may be instructive to consider briefly William Faulkner (1897-1962), whose works are frequently listed at the head of what is called the southern gothic tradition, and Doris Lessing (1919 –  2013 ), whose later works took a turn that brought them into the fold of the science-fiction branch of gothic. If there remains any doubt about the respectability of the genre and its writers, it may be noted here that both Faulkner and Lessing are winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Faulkner’s fictions have all the characteristic elements of the southern gothic: the traditional iconography; decaying mansions and graveyards; morbid, deathoriented actions and images; sins of the past; and virgins. The Sound and the Fury (1929) is concerned with the decaying Compson house and family, the implications of past actions, and Quentin’s morbid preoccupation with death and virginity; it features Benjy’s graveyard and important scenes in a cemetery. As I Lay Dying (1930) is structured around a long march to the cemetery with a stinking corpse. Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is full of decaying houses and lurid death scenes and features prominently three strange virgins—Rosa Coldfield, Judith Sutpen, and Clytie—or five if Quentin and Shreve are to be counted. In this work, the past eats the present up alive and the central figure, Thomas Sutpen, is much in the tradition of the charismatic, but boundlessly appropriating, gothic villain.

These cold gothic externals are only superficial images that betray the presence of the steaming psychological modern gothic centers of these works. Like Hawthorne, Faulkner creates interfacing human systems of neurosis whose inextricable coils lock each character into endless anxiety, producing hysteria, obsession, and utter loss of will and freedom. The violence and physical hyperbole in Faulkner reveal the truly gothic dilemmas of the characters, inaccessible to the mediations of active reason. As in Hawthorne, the combinations of characters form the catacombs of an inescapable though invisible castle or charnel house. Through these catacombs Faulkner’s characters run, but they cannot extricate themselves and thus simply revolve in a maze of involuted thought. The Compsons bind one another to tragedy, as do the Sutpens and their spiritual and psychological descendants.

There is, however, an alternative in the modern gothic impulse. In her insightful, imaginative study of the modern evolution of the gothic, Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence (1980), Judith Wilt assigns Lessing a place as the ultimate inheritor of the tradition. Lessing does portray exotic states of anxiety, variously descending into the netherworld ( Briefing for a Descent into Hell , 1971) and plunging into outer space (the Canopus in Argos series), but Wilt focuses on The Four-Gated City (1969). This novel has both the trappings and the spirit of the gothic. The book centers on a doomed old house and an old, traditional family succumbing to the sins of the past. These Lessing portrays as no less than the debilitating sins of Western culture, racist, sexist, and exploitive in character. Lessing does indeed bring down this house. Several of the major characters are released from doom, however, by an apocalyptic World War III that wipes away the old sins, freeing some characters for a new, fruitful, life without anxiety. Significantly, this new world will be structured not on the principles of reason and logic, which Lessing excoriates as the heart of the old sins, but on the basis of something innately nonrational and hard to identify. It is not instinct and not faith, but seems closest to imagination. Lessing’s ultimately hopeful vision, it must be conceded, is not shared by most contemporary practitioners of the genre. The gothic enjoyed a resurgence in the 1980’s that critics identified as a significant literary trend. Typical of the diversity of writers mentioned under this rubric are those represented in a collection edited by Patrick McGrath (born 1950): The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction (1991; with Bradford Morrow). McGrath, himself a writer of much-praised gothic fictions, assembled work by veteran novelists such as Robert Coover and John Hawkes as well as younger (now established) writers such as Jamaica Kincaid and William T. Vollmann; the group includes both the best-selling novelist Peter Straub and the assaultive experimental novelist Kathy Acker. These works were first collected by McGrath in the journal Conjunctions (1989), in which he contributed an essay outlining some of the characteristics of the new gothic. While resisting any attempt at rigid definition (the gothic, he says, is “an air, a tone, a tendency”; it is “not a monolith”), he acknowledges that all the writers whom he places in this group “concern themselves variously with extremes of sexual experience, with disease and social power, with murder and terror and death.” That much might be said about most gothic novelists from the beginnings of the genre. What perhaps differentiates many of the writers whom McGrath discusses from their predecessors—what makes the new gothic new—is a more self-consciously transgressive stance, evident in McGrath’s summation of the vision that he and his fellow writers share.

Common to all is an idea of evil, transgression of natural and social law, and the gothic, in all its suppleness, is the literature that permits that mad dream to be dreamt in a thousand forms.

Among popular-fiction writers, the gothic split into two main genres, one based on supernatural or psychological horror and the other based on women’s fiction, featuring romance and, often, historical settings. Moreover, combinations of the two traditions most approach the hyperreal intensity and blend of fear and passion seen in the original gothic: for example, the saga of the Dollanganger family by V. C. Andrews (1923-1986) or the Blood Opera series— Dark Dance (1992), Personal Darkness (1993), and Darkness, I (1994)—by Tanith Lee (1947-2015). While horror writers often substitute the suburbs or small town for the isolated castle—and sometimes psychic abilities, deranged computers, or psychotic killers for ghostly nuns and predatory villain-heroes—they continue to explore the intense feeling, perilous world, tense social situations, and alluring but corrupt sexuality of the original gothic. Unlike the romantic gothic, which has seen periods of quiescence and revival, an unbroken line of the horror gothic persisted from The Castle of Otranto through Dracula and into the twentieth century with books such as Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), by M. R. James (1862-1936), and the works of Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) and H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). These stories continue the trend—seen in Poe, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and others—of maintaining morbid and sensational gothic elements while rooting the terror in psychology and even epistemology. Often, hauntings reveal, or are even replaced by, obsession and paranoia. Before the burgeoning of the modern commercial horror novel, Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), in two eerie and lyrical novels, The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), uses the traditional gothic form and many of its motifs, with both psychological sophistication and true terror. Robert Bloch (1917-1994), with his novel Psycho (1959), also updates and psychologizes gothic conventions, substituting an out-of-the-way motel for a castle and explicitly invoking Sigmund Freud . The horror genre grew with the (arguably) gothic novel The Exorcist (1971), by William Peter Blatty (1928-2017), and with Rosemary’s Baby (1967), by Ira Levin (1929-2007). The novel transplants to a New York City apartment building the hidden secret, supernatural menace, and conspiracies against the heroine of early gothics. Although the horror market withered in the 1990’s, four best-selling authors continued in the gothichorror vein: Dean R. Koontz (born 1945), Straub, Stephen King (born 1947), and Anne Rice (born 1941). While much of Koontz’s horror is better classified as horror-adventure, lacking the brooding neuroses and doubts about rationality prevalent in gothic fiction, gothic aspects do dominate his novels Whispers (1980), Shadowfires (1987), Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son (2005; with Kevin J. Anderson), Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: City of Night (2005; with Edward Gorman), and Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Dead or Alive (2007; with Gorman). Koontz’s Demon Seed (1973) exemplifies the techno-gothic: A threatening setting and pursuing lover combine in a robot intelligence, which runs the house and wants to impregnate the heroine. Rice explores the gothic’s lush, dangerous sexuality and burden of the past in the novels of the Vampire Chronicles, including Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), Blood and Gold: Or, The Story of Marius (2001), and Blood Canticle (2003).

Straub’s Julia (1975; also known as Full Circle), is a drawing-room gothic novel, focusing on the haunting— supernatural, mentally pathological, or both—of a woman dominated by her husband and his disturbing, enmeshed family. In Ghost Story (1979), Shadowland (1980), and others, Straub widens the focus, exploring and critiquing the small town, boys’ school, or suburban setting while developing gothic themes, including dangerous secrets, guilt, ambivalent eroticism, and a threat from the past. In Lost Boy, Lost Girl (2003), the threats include a pedophile serial killer, a haunted house, and a missing man’s obsession with his dead mother. Straub explores other genres as well, especially the mystery, but maintains a gothic tone and intensity.

Similarly, King ’s early work is more strictly gothic, such as ’Salem’s Lot (1975), in which vampires spread through a small town in Maine, and The Shining (1977), a story of madness and terror in an isolated, empty hotel. However, many later works, even mimetic ones such as Gerald’s Game (1992), Dolores Claiborne (1993), Bag of Bones (1998), From a Buick Eight (2002), and Cell (2006), continue gothic themes and often a gothic tone. King is the undisputed best-selling author of the genre, having sold more than 330 million copies of his novels. Straub and King, admirers of one another’s work, have collaborated on two fantasy novels, The Talisman (1984), and a sequel, Black House (2001).

The prolific Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938), author of more than fifty novels, has created several memorable gothic works, including a Gothic Saga series comprising Bellefleur (1980) and its sequels. Another memorable work is Zombie (1995), an exploration of the mind of a serial killer, based on the life of Jeffrey Dahmer. New voices on the gothic-novel scene include Donna Tartt (born c. 1964), author of The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend (2002), and Elizabeth Kostova (born 1964), whose first novel, The Historian (2005), became a best seller and was translated into close to thirty languages.

Along with terror and horror, sentimental and romantic elements were established in the original gothic in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Clara Reeve, Susanna Rowson (1762-1824), and the Brontë sisters. In 1938, Rebecca , by Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989), the story of a young woman’s marriage to a wealthy English widower with a secret, conveyed many gothic conventions to a new audience, paving the way for the genre of gothic romance. Combining mystery, danger, and romantic fantasy, such books tend to feature innocent but admirable heroines, a powerful male love interest and his isolated estate, ominous secrets (often linked to a woman from the love interest’s past, as in Rebecca), and exotic settings that are remote in place and time.

In the early 1960’s, editor Gerald Gross of Ace Books used the term “gothic” for a line of paperbacks aimed at women, featuring primarily British authors such as Victoria Holt (pseudonym for Eleanor Alice Burford Hibbert, 1906-1993), Phyllis A. Whitney (1903-2008), and Dorothy Eden (1912-1982). The mystery and love plots are inextricable, and the novels feature many gothic elements, including besieged heroines; strong, enigmatic men; settings that evoke an atmosphere of tension and justified paranoia; heightened emotional states; doubled characters (including impersonation); and lurid, sometimes cruel, sexuality. In the 1970’s and later, erotic elements flourished and became more explicit, resulting in the new category of the erotic gothic.

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Vampire Narrative

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Postmodern Gothic

Source : Rollyson, Carl. Critical Survey Of Long Fiction . 4th ed. New Jersey: Salem Press, 2010. Bibliography Brown, Marshall. The Gothic Text. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Ellis, Markman. The History of Gothic Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Frank, Frederick S. Guide to the Gothic. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1984. _______. Guide to the Gothic II. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Geary, Robert F. The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Haggerty, George E. Queer Gothic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Jackson, Anna, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis, eds. The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. New York: Routledge, 2007. Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. Reprint. New York: Routledge, 1997. Mussell, Kay. Women’s Gothic and Romantic Fiction: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Norton, Rictor, ed. Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764-1840. Reprint. New York: Leicester University Press, 2006. Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. Punter, David, ed. A Companion to the Gothic. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England—Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987. Wright, Angela. Gothic Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

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Gothicism in literature

We can characterize the day as sunny based on features like bright, no clouds and no rain. We can also characterize the main character in the story as brave because she stands up to the bully. To characterize someone or something is like putting all those qualities and features together to get a good idea of what they’re really are.

Similarly, Gothicism in literature is a style of writing characterized by gloomy settings, supernatural elements, and exoticism. The Gothic writers compose terrifying stories featuring dark and creepy themes, supernatural interferences, ancient family curses and a prevailing atmosphere of terror and mystery.

In other words, Gothic Literature or Gothic fiction really abounds in frightening elements and dark themes. But do you know that this horror genre is so much more than a scary form of entertainment?

In order to fully appreciate Gothicism in literature, it’s mandatory to understand its place in history and society. Besides, it is equally necessary to explore the factors which led writers to adopt this particularly gruesome style of narration. It’s also essential that readers learn to recognize Gothic literature themes, motifs and conventions . Finally, I’ll discuss some famous Gothic writers and their major works . The discussion will end with exploring why Gothic fiction has retained its appeal even with today’s audiences .

So let’s dive right in!

Table of Contents

1. Introduction & Definition of Gothic Literature

The Gothic writers mostly fabricate their narratives using elements like horror, mystery, suspense, romance, decay and degeneration. They use these Gothic elements to tackle serious issues that require much attention. For instance, social injustice, corruption, the class system, gender norms, racism, and more.

The famous Gothic stories or novels usually contain grotesque characters, sheer terror, graphic morbidity, supernatural and picturesque adventures to entertain the reader. Besides, they also draw on emotional extremes and dark themes. The classic Gothic novels usually take place in settings like old, gloomy castles, mansions, and monasteries; all isolated and ruined. 

When do most Gothic novels take place?

A Gothic novel can take place in any time, past, present, or even future (such as sci-fi Gothic) , provided it incorporates some of the key elements of Gothic Literature . At the beginning of the Gothic genre, most Gothic novels took place in 18th and 19th century Europe, particularly during the Romantic period. Old mansions and isolated castles provided an ideal atmosphere for creating a mood of fear, dread, and suspense. This period was marked by a fascination with the supernatural, horror, and the darker aspects of human nature, which made it a popular setting for Gothic fiction.

2. Origin of Gothic Literature

Gothicism made its appearance in literature in the beginning of the Romantic Era (mid-18th Century). It was encouraged by the group of writers who were enchanted by the spell of medievalism. They wrote novels exhibiting the elements of terror, horror, suspense, superstition, mystery and romance; elements that eventually became the characteristics of Gothic novels .

How did Gothic literature emerge?

According to many critics, the Gothic novel in the beginning was a description of the fallen world. Early Gothic novels heavily focused on religion, morality, and philosophy, with the evil villains usually acting as metaphors for various human temptations the protagonist must overcome. Their endings were more often than not unhappy, and romance was never their focus. But in the centuries since, Gothic fiction not only developed, but also branched off into many popular subgenres, dealing with several themes.

3. Development of Gothicism in Literature: The Gothic Fiction & Writers

3.1. the first gothic novel.

The term ‘Gothic’ was first used in literature by Horace Walpole, an English author, art historian, and a Whig politician. He was the third son of Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first Prime Minister, and a pivotal figure in 18th century art, literature, society, and architecture. He used the term ‘Gothic’ in the subtitle of his novel “ The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story ” (1765). Walpole’s book resulted in a literary movement which has sired monsters, unleashed lightening and put damsels in distress for 250 years!

Horace Walpole actually borrowed the term ‘Gothic’ from medieval Gothic architecture and applied it in the context of horror. His novel ‘ The Castle of Otranto’ is the first Gothic novel , and is solely responsible for originating an entire new literary genre that ultimately gave rise to the literature of terror—Gothic literature. Without this forerunner of the Gothic novel, there may never have been a horror genre. With its compelling blend of sinister portents, tempestuous passions and ghostly visitations, it spawned an entire literary tradition and influenced such writers as Ann Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe , Bram Stoker and others.

3.2. ‘The Castle of Otranto’: A Pioneer of Gothic fiction

Walpole originally published The Castle of Otranto in 1964, calling it a translation from an old Italian manuscript. He did so because he thought that the style of the book would not be well received. But to his utter surprise, the public loved it and Walpole eventually confessed to its authorship in the second edition of the book published in 1765. According to him, the story of the book was inspired by a nightmare he experienced at his Gothic villa, Strawberry Hill, in Twickenham, London.

The Gothic Elements in ‘The Castle of Otranto’

Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto features many elements that definitely were innovative for the era and from which many authors drew inspiration. The book contains dark settings, supernatural elements, tyrants, mysteries and secrets—all known today as the traditional elements of Gothic literature . It has a medieval setting, with knights, vile and bullying usurpers, and pious and submissive girls.

  3.3. Why did Gothic fiction become so popular? And how did it flourish?

After Walpole’s “ The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story “, Gothic literature soon flourished successfully in Europe, America and some other countries including France. Its mysterious and adventurous stories set in dark and gloomy places, in fact, gained outstanding popularity in the 19th century.

Gothic fiction greatly appealed to the audience not only because it provided sensationalist entertainment but also because it portrayed stories of vulnerability and conflict with which the society could identify. 

A New Identity for Gothicism in Literature

Ann Radcliffe, for instance, was the most popular of the writers of Gothic fiction during the Romantic age. Her Gothic novels masterfully combined the mechanism of ‘terror’ (as practiced by Walpole and his followers) with sentimental but effective description of scenery. The Mysteries of Udolpho and the Italian are her best-known works.

3.4. What is American Gothic Fiction?

As an offshoot of Romanticism emerged Dark Romanticism, also known as American Gothic. As compared to Romanticism, it was darker, had more emphasis on the supernatural, and a deep fascination with the grotesque, irrational, and demonic. Initially, the American audience discarded this new genre because they considered it unreliable. It was mainly due to the fact that Gothic had its roots in history, something that America lacked. To make it stand out of other Gothics, American writers established their own Gothic characteristics, featuring their own conceptions of horror.

3.5. What made American Gothic Fiction distinctive from its European counterpart? 

Thus, it was Edgar Allan Poe who, with his masterful grip on the stories of ‘terror’, raised the Gothic genre to the peak of fame. He is best known today as the master of gothic horror tales and also the father of American Gothic literature .

Read More About Edgar Allan Poe

3.6. What are the Similarities and Differences between British Gothic and American Gothic literature?

In British Gothic fiction, the writers use certain techniques in order to confuse the reader, for instance, multiple narrators and plots. The main purpose behind this technique is to arouse readers’ curiosity and make what happens next all the more surprising. However, in American Gothic, the authors mainly utilize rhetorical devices such as imagery, personification, and symbolism for this purpose.

In British Gothic literature, terror is enhanced by the appearance of monsters, vampires, etc. While in American Gothic, the writers blend mystery and skepticism with strange events to enhance the feeling of terror.

4. Some Common Trends in Gothic Fiction

5. key elements of gothicism in literature: gothic novel elements.

Here are 10 key elements of Gothic fiction that will help you fully understand a Gothic novel:

5.1. Gothic Setting: Gloomy, Decaying Castles or Manors

Settings are an extremely important element in Gothic fiction. The most typical Gothic settings include cemeteries, old castles, crumbling mansions, haunted houses, underground crypts and tunnels, dungeons, swamps, and dark forests.

Thus, Gothic architecture plays an important role in Gothic literature. The setting of many of the Gothic stories is either a castle or large manor. This castle or large manor is usually abandoned or at least run-down. Whereas, in some Gothic novels it is far removed from civilization (so that no one can hear you when you call for help). Other settings in Gothic fiction may include caves or wilderness locales. For instance, a moor or heath. 

5.2. Male Protagonists: Beastly & Burdened 

Gothic novels mostly feature beastly and burdened protagonists. The main characters initially appear as a nice, decent person, but must ultimately face a monster within them. A prime example of this is Henry Jekyll from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

So, the typical Gothic protagonists face their own demons (the darkness ‘within’) while searching for peace among the living or the dead. Gothic fiction explores the madness within each human being as we often witness characters who represent the best and the worst versions of humanity.

5.3. Female Protagonists: Damsels in Distress

In Gothic novels, the female protagonists are often damsels in distress. That is, they are victims and need to be rescued. Throughout the Gothic story, they face events that leave them frightened, screaming, panting and fainting. Moreover, these female protagonists are also virtuous heroines who are either imprisoned in an abandoned castle or pursued by a beast or an aristocratic lord. Throughout the course of the story they are running, screaming, sobbing or terrifying. 

5.4. Ghosts, Monsters & Vampires

The antagonists in Gothic fiction are mainly ghosts, monsters, demons, vampires, zombies, witches, werewolves etc.  For instance, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , Victor Frankenstein creates a monster using body parts from various corpses in an attempt to make a perfect human being (which turns out to be a hideous monster!). 

5.5. Romance: Tragic and Bittersweet

Literally, the earliest works of Gothic fiction were called “Romances”—referring to the popular Medieval genre of Chivalric Romance, featuring the adventures of a heroic knight-errant on various quests. This is because romantic love often played a significant role in these stories, particularly in the form of the hero either wooing a beautiful maiden or rescuing a damsel in distress. Thus, early Gothic novels were an imitation of these medieval elements. 

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Interesting facts about gothic literature you must know, 5.6. gothic atmosphere: full of suspense and mystery.

The atmosphere in Gothic fiction is characterized by suspense, mystery and terror. It is further heightened by the unknown, unexplained or uncanny elements. The Gothic writers sometimes build their plot around a mystery: for instance, unknown parentage, someone’s disappearance, or many other inexplicable events. 

5.7. Gothic Melodrama

Gothic fiction is highly melodramatic since emotions run high in Gothicism, reflecting a heightened sense of drama. We often find women swooning in Gothic novels and men raging due to some unseen inner torments. Gothic novels also feature murders, kidnappings, people going mad, and women holding knives. They are stories of conflicts that are heightened with music.

5.8. The Grotesque in Gothic Fiction

Another key element of Gothicism in literature is the grotesque. Almost similar to the uncanny, the grotesque in Gothic fiction results from the striking combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar, or more likely the distorted familiar. It means that a character has a lack of knowledge about an unknown disturbing issue, but he/she simultaneously anticipates that some evil explanation is lurking behind it. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is an obvious example in this regard.

Weather conditions like storms, fog, rain, wind, full moons, and clouds also play an important role in arousing the sense of the grotesque.

5.9. Exoticism

5.10. terror and horror.

Both terror and horror are key elements of Gothicism in literature. However there is an obvious distinction between them: horror evokes physical emotion i.e. sensationalism; whereas terror is more psychological i.e. dealing with subtle and sublime. 

Terror in Gothicism results from dreadful suspense and veils a ghastly unknown. Whereas, horror stems out of generating revulsion. Terror persuades the reader to advance cautiously and with anticipation. While horror yearns for the sudden, crude, blatantly comic, and for the grotesque. 

Read More Elements of Gothic Literature

6. major characteristics of gothicism in literature.

Gothic Literature or Gothic fiction contains four major elements: 

6.1. Mysterious Happenings and Suspense

The plot of the Gothic novel or story consists of mysterious happenings and suspense. For example, the disappearance of characters or things is a very common feature of Gothicism in literature. Besides, the unknown parentage of the protagonist, the hidden secrets and unexplained manifestations in the Gothic fiction are utilized to invoke suspense among the readers.

6.2. Existence of Supernatural Elements

6.3. the gothic buildings, 6.4. bleak and deadly atmosphere .

The atmosphere of bleakness, thrill, death, and decay has a key role in Gothic fiction. The dark and dismal themes are aptly utilized by the Gothic writers to enhance the bleak atmosphere. In addition, the characters in the story are constantly facing terror of the unknown.  We find them, for instance, struggling to evade their death at the hands of some supernatural being or a barbarous aristocrat. This key feature, in fact, has a tendency to invoke thrill among the readers.

6.5. Hereditary Curses and Prophecies

6.6. psychological trauma and mental disorder.

Furthermore, the character’s mental illness, sometimes, stems out of the guilt of his past sins or crimes. While, in many cases, its causes are different. The character’s psychological trauma finally leads to his split personality and he becomes a threat for the surrounding people.

6.7. The Awful Weather and Frightening tone

7. major themes in gothic fiction.

Themes refer to ideas that are recurrent or pervade a work of literature or art. They are the underlying meaning of a story. Themes give us an idea of what the writer is trying to convey through the story.

8. Some Important Motifs and Conventions in Gothic Fiction

Although ridiculed, and associated with female hysteria or female writers in its heyday, Gothicism in literature is a highly seditious vehicle for the interrogation and dissemination of un-conventional ideologies, non-conformist criticisms of society, and alternative ways of existing.

10. A List of Famous Gothic Novels of All Time

20 most famous classic gothic novels you must read, 11. famous gothic writers: representatives of gothicism in literature, horace walpole.

Horace Walpole (1717-1797), the 4th earl of Oxford, was a famous antiquarian, art historian, politician, and author. He was the third son of Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first Prime Minister. Educated at King’s College and Eton College, Cambridge, he was a multipotential man with a slew of influential friends. Over his lifetime Walpole was an avid reader and writer. He also founded Strawberry Hill House, the Gothic Revival villa in London.

William Thomas Beckford

William Thomas Beckford (1760-1844) was an English novelist, art critic, politician and traveler. Despite being rich and renowned in the family, he failed to make a political career due to the homosexual scandals he was starring in. Just to avoid being incriminated, he travelled long across Europe, developing a long Grand Tour and accumulating literary experiences. He was an eccentric collector of artworks and tried his best to accurately dissipate his heritage until the day he died. 

Ann Radcliffe

Radcliffe’s most well known work is The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), one of the earliest examples of the Gothic romance genre. The book features large, ancient, imposing structures in desolate landscapes and heroines left to fend for themselves against sinister forces.

Do You Know? An interesting rumor about Anne Radcliffe was that before bed, she ate pork to weigh her stomach and thus increase the chances of having a nightmare. This way she was inspired to write her Gothic tales.

Matthew gregory lewis .

Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818) was an English writer and dramatist, well-known for his Gothic novels. His most famous Gothic work is The Monk . The novel attained sensational popularity with it’s violence and eroticism, and its overall focus on horror rather than romance. He was frequently referred to as ‘Monk’ Lewis after that.

Charles Brockden Brown

Brown published Wieland, or, the Transformation in 1798, which is now considered the first American Gothic novel. The novel is filled with suspense and mystery, and discusses subjects as religious fanaticism, belief in supernatural, and psychological manipulation.  

Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley is most famous for her Gothic masterpiece Frankenstein which some argue as being one of the first works of science fiction. Her book is a deep reflection on human existence as well as an analysis of the boundaries between morals and scientific creation. Her lesser known works include Mathilda , Valperga , and The Last Man . 

John William Polidori

According to some, it was Polidori who created the first aristocratic literary vampire, Lord Ruthven, modelling him on his employer and based on a piece written by Lord Byron. His literary vampire combines evil with the quality of a lovely aristocrat of women. 

Charles Maturin

Maturin is most famous for his Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). This novel, through a series of stories, tells of the Wanderer’s effort to seek redemption for selling his soul for 150 extra years of life. When talking about the development of Gothic fiction, it’s impossible not to mention Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. This was one of those titles that helped to shape Gothic fiction itself.

Edgar Allan Poe

Bram stoker.

In 1878, Bram Stoker became the private secretary and collaborator of British actor Henry Irving, of whom he wrote a long and exciting biography. He was a man of enormous physical stature as well as a man of enormous and powerful genius and imagination. 

Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been talked about a lot and thousands of versions and adaptations have been released, both in film and literature. But the original can’t compare to any. 

Read More About Bram Stoker

The Brontë Sisters

The Brontë sisters with their writings broke out of traditionally perceived social roles destined for a woman, hence using male nicknames. Originally their fascination with English literature was not very enthusiastically accepted, it was rather men who were seen as writers: sensitive and with a rich imagination. The novels of the Brontë sisters feature very complicate protagonists, with unusual traits and weaknesses. However, their female characters are self-reliant, emancipated, and self-conscious. All sisters died young, most likely from tuberculosis.  

Oscar Wilde

Wilde has created beautiful, complex characters who are dark and disturbing, yet enjoyable. He talks about both the crafts of art and writing in an absolutely meaningful way. However, he was also severely criticized for the novel’s corrupting influence and unashamed immoral ideology of the protagonist.

Robert Louis Stevenson

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant”—Robert Louis Stevenson

Sheridan Le Fanu

Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was an Irish writer famous for his tales of mystery and Gothic horror. He is one of the masters of Gothic literature and also of the precursors of the modern genre of terror. Sheridan Le Fanu’s famous Gothic novels are Uncle Silas , Carmilla , and The House by the Churchyard , In A Glass Darkly and others.

Daphne du Maurier

Daphne du Maurier is most famous for Gothic novels such as Rebecca (1938) and My Cousin Rachel (1951), both taken to the movies. She also wrote some famous Gothic short stories such as The Birds and Don’t Look Now, both made into classic films.

12. Difference between Romanticism and Gothicism in Literature

Since Gothicism is characterized by some critics as a subgenre of Romanticism, both share many similarities as well. For instance, both genres deal with the existence of sublime and transcendent, reason and rationality, and the medieval references. 

13. Why is Gothicism in Literature Still Popular Today?

Originating in England, the Gothic style of writing has never gone outdated. In fact, it’s gaining more and more popularity with the passage of time. Mystery, suspense and horror—these elements when added to the story—have a tendency to excite everyone. This is something that has encouraged the Gothic writers to produce more works of horror and mystery.

In addition, Gothicism has become a major source of inspiration for today’s blockbuster horror movies, TV series, and graphic horror novels. All these means of entertainment, indeed, forever appeal to the reader!

Read on Readers!

Sources of this article: .

Best Southern Gothic Novels That Are Deliciously Haunting

18 spine chilling modern gothic novels to read in 2024, edgar allan poe | the master of mystery and macabre.

Gothic literature, poetry, and prose is that which deals with themes of death, the supernatural, sorrow, fear, loss, and more.

The word “gothic” can be applied to a movement of literary works that include fiction and poetry. There is no one style that is defined as singularly “gothic” nor is there one writer who exemplifies all the qualities of “gothic literature” (although some come close).   The most specific part of the style is in relation to the subject matter , form, and other structural considerations that are less important. Gothic literature is usually considered as a sub-genre of Romantic literature.

Explore Gothic Literature

• 1 Elements of Gothic Literature 
• 2 History of Gothic Literature 
• 3 Influence of Gothic Literature 
• 4 Examples of Gothic Literature 

Elements of Gothic Literature  

The name “gothic” provides the reader with a lot that they need to know to understand what this genre is all about. Works that are usually considered “gothic” include elements of melodrama , terror, mystery, dread, sorrow, dark and stormy settings, and even threatening and/or supernatural beings or elements. These stories, novels , and poems were not devoid of romance either, or elements of travel and adventure.  

History of Gothic Literature  

When considering whether or not something is “gothic” the time period in which it was written is often taken into consideration. The first example of the word “gothic” being used in regards to litter was in Horace Walpole’s story “The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story” published in 1765. But, at that time the word “gothic” didn’t mean what it does today. Rather, it meant something closer to “barbarous,” reaching back to the Middle Ages.  

The earliest tales and poems in this style were written in the 18th century. These pieces looked back to medical Europe, using this period to craft the overall tone that the writer was looking for. Images and themes of the period were often incorporated. The poems, stories, and novels were often romantic and melodramatic , the settings were usually dark and usually psychologically tense. Writers of this period include Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, and Charles Brockden Brown.  

Moving into the 19th century, the most prominent gothic writer of the period was Edgar Allan Poe who is often cited as the best writer on gothic themes. He combined many of the elements that we now associate with gothic literature into his poems and short stories . These include supernatural elements and beings, mental and physical fear, as well as death, loss, and sorrow. It is the work of Poe that many writers now look to today when they are seeking the influence of Gothic literature. Other 19th century gothic writers include Robert Louis Stevenson , Bram Stoker, and Sir Walter Scott. Although not all of their works might be considered “Gothic,” many are.  

Influence of Gothic Literature  

Writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley , Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( ‘ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ being one of the best examples), and others from the Romantic era often looked to Gothic literature in order to inform their own work. They took the dark images and combine them with their focus on nature and love.  

Examples of Gothic Literature  

Example #1 goblin market by christina rossetti  .

A mysterious and disturbing poem, ‘Goblin Market,’ leaves a mark on all who read it. It is Rossetti’s most popular long poem and it tells the story, through twenty-eight stanzas , of two sisters who unfortunately follow the trail to a goblin market. Here are a few lines from the poem:

Oh,” cried Lizzie, “Laura, Laura,   You should not peep at goblin men.”   Lizzie cover’d up her eyes,   Cover’d close lest they should look;   Laura rear’d her glossy head,   And whisper’d like the restless brook:   “Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,   Down the glen tramp little men.  

After eating one of the fruits, Laura falls ill and is only saved from death when her sister, Lizzie, kisses the fruit juice from her cheeks.  

Example #2 The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Lord Tennyson  

‘The Lady of Shalott’ was published in 1833 and is one of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s best poems. It ells the story, based around an Arthurian legend , of a woman who dies of unrequited love. Here are a few lines from the poem:  

She left the web, she left the loom   She made three paces thro’ the room   She saw the water-flower bloom,   She saw the helmet and the plume,   She look’d down to Camelot.   Out flew the web and floated wide;   The mirror crack’d from side to side;   ‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried   The Lady of Shalott.  

The lady suffers from a curse and is doomed to see the world through a mirror until her death. With the approach of Sir Lancelot, is soon tempted away from the mirror and loses her life.  

Example #3 The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe  

‘The Raven’ is by far Poe’s most famous poem. It is also considered to be one of the best examples of Gothic poetry ever written. Here are a few lines from this piece:  

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before; But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?” This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”— Merely this and nothing more.

The poem is long, supernatural, dark, and filled with fear and uncertainty—all elements of the sub-genre. Poe’s raven, calling out “Nevermore” is the most memorable image, the word haunting the narrator of the poem and helping to drive him towards madness.  

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Gothic Novel | Definition, Characteristics, History, Essay, Examples in Literature

Gothic Novel in Literature

Table of Contents

Gothic Novel Definition

Gothic Novel is a “genre of fiction characterized by mystery and supernatural horror, often set in a dark castle or other medieval setting.” Such novel is pseudo-medieval fiction with a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror. Gothic novel is sometimes referred to as Gothic horror. It is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance .

Gothicism ‘s origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto , subtitled “A Gothic Story “. The Gothic novel was a branch of the larger Romantic movement that sought to stimulate strong emotions in the reader – fear and apprehension in this case.’ Such novel takes its name from medieval architecture, as it often hearkens back to the medieval era in spirit and subject matter and often uses Gothic buildings as a setting. The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror. It is an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole’s novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) are other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole.

Historical Background of Gothic

The Goths were one of the many Germanic tribes. They fought numerous battles with the Roman Empire for centuries. According to their own myths, as narrated by Jordanes, a Gothic historian from the mid 6th century, the Goths originated in what is now southern Sweden, but their king Berig led them to the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. Later Goths separated into twongroups, the Visigoths (the West Goths) and Ostrogoths (the East Goths). They were named so because of the place where they finally settled.

They reached the height of their utmost power around 5th century A.D., when they sacked Rome and captured Spain, but their history finally subsumed under that of the countries they conquered (“Goths”). During the Renaissance, Europeans rediscovered Greco-Roman culture. They began to regard a particular type of architecture, mainly those built during the middle Ages, as “gothic.” It was not because of any connection to the Goths, but because the ‘Uomo Universale’ considered these buildings “barbaric” and definitely not in that Classical style. Centuries more passed before “gothic” came to describe a certain type of novels . This was named so because all these novels seem to take place in Gothic-styled architecture which was mainly castles, mansions, and abbeys.

Gothic Novel Characteristics

Setting in a castle or Mansions

An atmosphere of mystery and suspense pervaded by threatening feeling

An ancient and obscure prophecy may be connected with the castle or its inhabitants (either former or present).

Character may have Omens, portents, visions.

Supernatural or otherwise inexplicable and dramatic events may occur.

Characters may have high, even overwrought emotion resulting in crying and emotional speeches.

Female characters are often in distress and are oppressed in order to gain sympathy of the readers.

Women are threatened by a powerful and tyrannical male.

The metonymy of gloom and horror. Metonymy is a subtype of metaphor, in which something (like rain) is used to stand for something else (like sorrow). For example, the film industry likes to use metonymy as a quick shorthand, so we often notice that it is raining in funeral scenes.

A peculiar glossary of the gothic novels for mystery, fear, terror, surprise, haste anger or largeness for creating the atmosphere.

Gothic Novel Examples

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is often regarded as the first true Gothic romance . Walpole was obsessed with medieval Gothic architecture, and built his own house, Strawberry Hill, in that form, sparking a fashion for Gothic revival. A few good examples of Gothic fiction are Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796) was the book that introduced more horrific elements into the English gothic. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstei n (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are fine examples of gothic novels .

• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a Gothic Novel

Gothic Novel: An Essay

The Gothic fiction , however, enjoyed its heyday from 1762 to 1820 and influenced and inspired the sensational writers of the late nineteenth century. Certain merits of the Gothic fiction have been recognised by the Freudian psychologists. Herbert Read in his book Surrealism remarks: “It is possible that Monk Lewis, Maturin and Mrs. Radcliffe should relatively to Scott, Dickens and Hardy occupy a much higher rank.” He had defended the Gothic fiction against the objections that the plots of these novels are fictitious, that the characters are unreal and the sentiments that excite are morbid,

“All these judgements merely reflect our prejudices. It is proper for a work of imagination to be fictitious, and for characters to be typical rather than realistic.”

Dr. D. P. Varma in his book “ The Gothic Flame ” observes : “The Gothic novel is a conception as vast and complex as a Gothic Cathedral. One finds in it the same sinister overtone and the same solemn grandeur.” According to Montague Summers ( The Gothic Quest ), Gothic was the essence of romanticism, and romanticism was the literary expression of supernaturalism. As a matter of fact, the Gothic fiction was a profound reaction against the long domination of reason and authority. The Gothic novelists enlarged the sense of reality and its impact on human beings. It acknowledged the nonrational in the world of things and events, occasionally in the realm of transcendental, ultimately and most persistently in the depth of the human being. The application of Freudian psychology to literature has altered our attitude to the Gothic romances. The suppressed neurotic and erotic of educated society are reflected in the Gothic romances.

“The scenes of no in the Gothic fiction may have been the harmless release of that innate sp of cruelty which is present in each of us, an impulse mysterious inextricable connected with the very forces of life and death”

(Prof. Varma)

The Gothic fiction has a resemblance to the Gothic Architecture . The weird and eerie atmosphere of Gothic fiction was derived from the Gothic architecture which evoked feelings of horror, wildness, suspense and gloom. The stimulation of fear and the probing of the mysterious provided the raison d’etre of the Gothic novelists who took an important part in liberating the emotional energies that had been so long restrained by common sense and good form.

A number of influences contributed to the growth of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth century. It developed against the spirit of the Age of Reason and the stern warning of Dr. Johnson. The Gothic novel owes particularly to the picturesque antiquarianism, ruins and graveyard sentiment. Kenneth Clark in The Gothic Revival says : The Gothic novelists were the natural successors to the Graveyard poets. In the 18th century , the ghost stories were wide in circulation and people showed interest in questions of life, death, the occult, magic and astrology. The popularity of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton intensified people’s belief in the supernatural. The Gothic novelists were inspired by the examples of Italy, France and Germany and by the oriental allegory or moral apologue of the east. Addison’s The Vision of Mirza (1711) and Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) gave some colour to Gothic romance .

Horace Walpole was the pioneer in Gothic fiction. Walpole’s sensitive imagination and dreaming mind absorbed the spirit of romanticism. His antiquarian interests caught the Gothic spirit–the romantic setting the continuous spell of horror, the colour of melancholy, awe and superstition which blossomed in The Castle of Otranto (1764). The Gothic romance is a horror novel in which we have walking skeletons, pictures that move out of their frames and their blood-curdling incidents. The ghostly machinery is often cumbrous but as a return to the romantic elements of mystery and fear, the book is noteworthy. Diana Neill, however, dismisses the book as amusing rather than frightening. Virginia Woolf in an article stated, “Walpole had imagination, taste, style in addition to a passion for the romantic past.” Miss Clara Reeve wrote many Gothic romances, the chief of them being

‘The Old English Baron’. She was the first Gothic novelist to make use of dreams. Miss Clara Reeve, however, lacked vivid imagination. Montague Summers condemns The Old English Baron as a “dull and didactic narrative told in a style of chilling mediocrity.”

Mrs. Ann Radcliffe , the wife of an Oxford graduate has been called “the Shakespeare of Romance writers”. Montague Summers refers to the sombre and sublime genius of Ann Radcliffe. Her romantic temperament, her passion for music and wild scenery, her love of solitude, her interest in the mysterious, her ability to arouse wonder and fear helped her in writing masterpiece in Gothic fiction. During the years 1789-1797, she wrote five romances Castles of Athlian and Dubayne , A Cicelian Romance , The Romance of the Forest , The Mysteries of Udolpho , The Italian Coleridge called The Mystery of Udolpho “the most interesting novel in the English language” . Its noble outline, its majestic and beautiful images harmonizing with the scenes exert an irresistible fascination. It gradually rises from the gentlest beauty towards the terrific and the sublime. Unlike other terror novelists, Mrs. Radcliffe rationalised the supernatural. We hear mysterious voices in the chamber of Udolpho, but we are told that they were the wanton tricks of a prisoner. She employed scenery for their own sake in the novel. Moreover, by her insight into the workings of fear, she contributed to the development of the psychological novel . She adopted the dramatic structure of the novel which influenced the Victorian novelists. Thus her influence percolated through Scott on the 19th century novel in its various aspects-psychological, romantic and structural.

Matthew Gregory Lewis made a spine-chilling and blood-curdling use of magic and necromancy and pointed the grim and ghastly themes in lurid colours. His The Monk absorbed the ghastly and crude supernaturalism of the German Romantic movement in English fiction. It is melodrama epitomised. He indulges in crude supernaturalism rising to a grotesque climax borrowed from Dr. Faustus , when a demon rescues the villain-hero from execution only to fly high in the air with him and drop him to his death cm jagged rocks.

Beckford’s Vathek is wholly a fantasy. Its air of mystery arises from supposedly unnatural causes, while a sense of horror is heightened for artistic effect. Its gorgeous style and stately descriptions, its exaltation of both poetic and moral justice relate it to the Gothic romance,

Charles Robert Maturin wrote a number of nicely constructed Gothic romances : The Fatal Revenge (1807), The Wild Irish Boy (1808). The Mebsian Chief (1872), Melmoth , The Wanderer (1820). Maturin dispensed with the spine-chilling paraphernalia of the Terror School and concentrated his attention on the suggestive and psychological handling of the stories. His acute insight into character, vivid descriptive faculty and sensitive style of writing are in the tradition of Mrs. Radcliffe; but by his unabashed of the supernatural he treads in the footsteps of Lewis. He introduces horror in the novel by the clever Radcliffian device of reticence and suggestion. His Melmoth the Wanderer may be called the swan song of Gothic fiction . After it the fashion gradually died away. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a remarkable Gothic novel. She employed the pseudo-scientific technique in depicting horrors in the novel. William Godwin wrote two horror novels Caleb Williams and St. Leon. He neither imitates the suggestive method of Mrs. Radcliffe, nor the gruesome horrors of Gregory Lewis, but he creates physical realistic horrors in his novels.

Gothic Literature in the Romantic Period

In both Gothic and romantic creeds there is a tendency to slip imperceptivity from the real into the other world, to demolish barriers between the physical and the psychic or supernatural. Wordsworth’s Guilt and Sorrow , Peter Bell , Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner , Kubla Khan , Christabel , Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame Sans Mercy , Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas are some Gothic poems influenced by the technique and devices of the Gothic fiction.

Gothic Literature in the Victorian Period

The Gothic romances have great influence on the Victorian and modern fiction. The sensational novels of Bulwar Lytton, Wilkie Collins in their emphasis on mystery and terror are a direct descent from the Gothic novels. The Bronte sisters luxuriously used the suggestive method of Radcliffe for creating the Gothic atmosphere in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre . Walter de la Mare’s Poem The Listeners is full of gothic setting.

Gothic Literature in the Modern Period

In modern times, the fantasy of H. G. Wells , and C. S. Lewis, J . K Rowling, Edgar Allan Poe shows us worlds unknown, monstrous and horrible. The modern detective novels of Edgar Wallace and Peter Cheney are influenced by the Gothic romances. They provided a pattern and also inspired the sensational writers of to-day with the incentive that set them on the sinister paths of crime fiction.

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Gothic Literature

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Copyright year: 2013
• Audience: College/higher education;
• Main content: 224
• Keywords: Literary Studies
• Published: March 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9780748647439